Digi Labs in Wayzata, Minnesota has an ambitious plan to build a fleet of autonomous robots that solve the growing problem with Canadian Geese. Namely, they are everywhere and increasing in numbers exponentially. Across North America these geese are responsible for millions of dollars in damage. If you have a waterfront residential property, or a business with enough space to host these creatures, then you already understand what I’m talking about. They attack people, get in the way, and leave behind mounds of poop. In the worst cases, they end up in airplane engines near a runway or smashed into the front of a car.
Digi Labs’ Wild Goosechaser is built on the Open Rover 4WD robot platform. It features an Nvidia Tx2, along with a number of cameras and other sensors, so that it can perform onboard image recognition, and then respond with path planning and autonomous navigation. The Wild Goosechaser does just that… it chases the geese away! When the geese have moved on to another location, the robot returns to the charging dock and replenishes its batteries.
Although it is a proprietary robot, many of the software tools used to build The Wild Goosechaser robots are available on the Rover Robotics Github page. The team at Digi Labs developed a full application for monitoring their growing fleet of robots. Check out the video below.
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