A Drone That Answers the Call of Doody

It is hard to imagine finding a better, truer friend than a dog — after all, who else would ever be so excited to see us after we come back home from a short trip to the grocery store? For our furry friends, it is as if years had passed, and no amount of celebration could be too extravagant for such a joyous event. But owning a dog is not all fun and games. They are a lot of work as well, and some of it is downright disgusting.

New dog owners will soon learn the art of dog walking, for example. This is a ritual that needs to be repeated day, after day, after day. That might not seem so bad until one learns that “walking” is actually secret code for “follow the dog around until it poops, then pick it up in a bag.” Caleb Olson is an engineer that loves his dog Twinkie, but hates cleaning up after her, so he has been on a long quest to do away with this dirty business through technology.

Olson’s first effort was a computer-vision based system that monitored his backyard looking for the telltale signs that Twinkie was leaving an unpleasant surprise. This system mapped out all of the detected locations so that they could later be taken care of in one go. A follow-up project added a robot arm with a laser pointer to make the clean-up locations more clear and speed up the job.

But ultimately, Olson still needed to clean up Twinkie’s mess, so aside from saving a little time, the dirty work still had to be done. That inspired him to build what he calls The Poopcopter, which is a drone-based dog poop detection and removal system. It autonomously flies over his backyard streaming video to a remote computer. That computer runs an object detection algorithm that looks for dog poop (I’m sure fun times were had collecting that training dataset!).

When the object detection algorithm finds a hit, that fact, along with the location, is sent to a Raspberry Pi single-board computer mounted on the drone. It then instructs the flight controller, which it is hardwired to, to fly to the correct location, which must be done with a high degree of precision.

Once in the correct spot, the drone lands on the ground with a pickup mechanism attached to its bottom making contact first. The bell-shaped pickup mechanism has leaves that open and close as it is rotated one way or the other. So after landing, the mechanism rotates to seal itself, then the drone can fly away and deliver its payload to the trash (or a neighbor’s yard if you are having a bad day).

While this project is certainly humorous, it does also solve a real problem. Olson believes that these drones could either be individually owned, or operated by a third-party service provider that drives by and periodically unleashes them for collections. He is not quite sure exactly what to do with The Poopcopter, however, so if you have some ideas, be sure to get in contact with him.