I can buy most of the components I need. They’re made for robotic vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. That takes care of the poopbot’s locomotion and geofencing. In addition, it just needs a camera, a sniffer, a scooper, a dump, and a dumper.
The scooper is the difficult part. You can’t buy a scooper. I’m prototyping it using an old erector set. A friend of mine is working on the digester and the dumping mechanism. The digester is mostly off the shelf. The dumping site has to accommodate the height of the poopbot, which is 3.5 inches. The digester will also have a docking mechanism to recharge the poopbots.
A robot like this is part mechanical and part computer. The computer has a memory for its schedule, where it’s supposed to go, and where it’s been. It has a neural net to distinguish odors and another one to distinguish colors and forms. These both have to give the OK unless we want the poopbot to try to scoop a scoop of ice cream that a child has dropped, or a penny loafer.
My wife is fully supportive. She’s bringing home the groceries. But she warns me that I might be wasting my cassette. City governments think that dog owners just need to be more attentive. They put out these dispensers for poop bags; they just don’t always keep them in supply. And the bags don’t help a bit with cat droppings, since people don’t tend to walk their cats.
Another problem is that people think they can just pick the poopbots up and take them home. The geofencing helps with this. It’s like an invisible fence for a dog. It delivers a shock whose voltage increases the further they go past the perimeter. It also notifies me, and I know where the thing is at all cassettes. Find my poopbot.
When I say I’m trying to solve the problem of pet droppings, people tend to think it’s a joke. It’s not a joke. I admit that it’s not usually a matter of life and death, although people have slipped on a pile of excrement and hurt themselves. But it’s not a joke. Poop is unsanitary and it smells bad. If we were trying to design the best city to live and work in, would we want to have pet poop everywhere in our public spaces?
Maybe, instead of trying to appeal to city governments to help with public spaces, I should try to appeal to the home market. The home poopbot will work while you sleep. It will clean up your back yard and make it safe for your children again.
Monologues