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Feral Robotic Dogs

By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 03/12/05

In a recent Gearblog posting discussing the launch of Make: magazine we mentioned a few of the articles in the first issue. One of those articles was titled "Hacking the Dog" by Cory Doctrow that discussed the Feral Robotic Dogs project run by Natalie Jeremijenko of the Experimental Product Design Lab at the University of California San Diego.

The idea behind the Experimental Product Design Lab is simple: Have students explore the engineering of mass produced products. But it gets really interesting when toy robot dogs met heavy mods ...

The students are given cheap (around $20) robotic toys and asked to upgrade the drive mechanisms to make them capable of real world travel. They then equip the robots with environmental sensors that can detect things like volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The now burly and sensitive robots also get rewired and their onboard electronics augmented to make the devices react to whatever their detectors pick up.

In the case of VOCs (stuff like dry cleaning agents and solvents) the feral robotic dogs would display VOC-tropic behavior allowing them to detect "hot spots" of contamination. And guess what? The strategy works! According to the Make: article the Bronx's Starlight Park had been contaminated but was declared clean by the Environmental Protection Agency. A pack of feral robotic dogs disagreed by finding a number of areas that were still seriously contaminated.

It appears that using cheap autonomous robots for environmental assessment and monitoring is a better bet than the highly trained experts currently used. We wonder whether the EPA will adopt this technology? Probably not ... that would be too easy.

The Feral Robotic Dogs project is definitely very cool. There's an article on Jeremijenko's work and she has a blog.

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