The University of Pennsylvania has a poop-scooping pal
Formally the name of the project responsible for developing this robot is Perception Of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control Of Object Pickup but the acronym POOP SCOOP puts things more bluntly.
While Graspy makes for a great poop scooping robot ( it has a 95% success rate in its poop scooping trials), it’s likely that the team at the GRASP lab from the University of Pennsylvania also has other aspirations for GRASPY, their specially trained PR2 robot.
The PR2′s are a group of robots who can delicately grasp a wide range of unknown objects, such as fruit, eggs, and heavy liquid-filled containers, all without crushing or dropping them. The team’s basic approach has been to recreate the same sensory information that humans use when completing these types of tasks.
Graspy can actually sense whether or not it has successfully dropped the poop in the bucket. If it at first Graspy doesn’t succeed, it will try try again! Although it’s persistent, Graspy still has a little room for improvement; its creators have pointed out that the robot is currently only successful at picking up high fiber poops….