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As dog owners, we might all agree that picking up our dogs’ mess is on the bottom of our ‘favorite things’ list about pet ownership.
Well, a dog owner has had enough from picking up after his dog and decided to design and build the “Poopcopter” – the “world’s first aerial bound self-guided dog poop removal system“.
In the handy invention’s YouTube video description, it read, “The Poopcopter is the world’s first aerial bound self guided dog poop removal system, using a drone, 3D printed a pickup mechanism, and some machine learning – so that you never have to pick up dog poop again!”
“No one likes to pick dog poop,” the Poopcopter’s inventor, Caleb Olson says during the live showcase of the machine at the Minnedemo40. “And I thought about this problem way more than I’d like to admit,” he adds.
Before the Poopcopter was born, Olson explains that he initially built a dog poop detector using a security camera. It is then used to monitor his dog, Twinky, to alert him after she’s done relieving herself, and to track Twinky’s poop spots.
He then took the automation further – he developed a robot laser that pinpointed the exact location of the poop, making it easier to find.
However, these still didn’t solve Olson’s main problem: picking up and still having to touch the poop himself.
“Today, you don’t have to touch the poop,” Olson reveals. “The Poopcopter is capable of scanning areas defined by a user, your backyard for example, and as it’s scanning, it’s performing real-time computer vision using the camera, which is inside the drone.”
The machine uses a bell-shaped container with geared leaves that helps effectively pick up waste.
“It’s kind of like a UFO except it’s abducting dog poop instead of people,” Olson says.
Olson also tells SWNS, “Once the drone performs a precision… landing on top of poop, all the drone needs to do is rotate 30 degrees to close the mechanism, picking up the poop.”
Once it secures the waste, the machine then flies to a designated drop off location, or it can spin around fast enough to fling the waste anywhere.
“It’s fully self guided, fully capable of retrieving poop from grass, and it’s full of crap, ” he adds.
According to Olson, the machine may be available for purchase in the future. But for now, Olson said he is working to improve his invention in the hopes that it will soon change the game for dog poop removal.
“I don’t really know what to do with this thing,” he said jokingly.