Having cute little pets was never limited to fluffy dogs or cats. As much as it sounds weird to some, keeping rodents, iguanas, turtles, and rabbits is pretty common. They are not exactly easy pets, but you’d better be thankful that they are not screechy and noisy because keeping a parrot can get pretty annoying. That does not mean you would want to give your pet away and if you are a genius, you could actually build it a robotic car to keep it occupied.
Andrew Grey, The proud owner of an African Grey Parrot and based out of Florida, was being driven mad by his pet and clearly, drugging himself or grilling the parrot was not an option. So Andrew, a computer engineering graduate student at the University of Florida just built his parrot a robotic car.
Andrew’s pet parrot Pepper had begun to scream a lot, and the screeches went down only when Andrew was around. He began to experiment with robotic anti-scream squirt guns that Pepper eventually began to like. The computer engineer decided to build Pepper a robotic car that could follow him around the house to keep him calm.
The parrot’s electric toy car was tagged as BirdBuggy, with front wheels powered. A perch on top holds the bird as it controls the car with a four-way joystick so it can turn left or right or move forwards or backward. When the car goes into the robotic mode, it manoeuvres to its charging station using its camera based computer vision. The bump sensors on the car and the infrared collision avoidance system keeps the ride safe for the birdie.
