When Cameron Park Zoo officials reached out to Texas State Technical College in July with the idea of an experimental partnership, students in the school’s robotics program couldn’t help speculating.
“Everybody’s first guess was, ‘I bet it’s a pooper scooper,” said TSTC robotics instructor Corey Mayo. “And that’s exactly what it turned out to be.”
A team at Cameron Park Zoo wants a robot capable of removing some 350 pounds of grassy dung produced each day by Tembo, the zoo’s African elephant — a time-consuming task for zoo keepers to perform safely.
The robot also needs to use cameras and sensors to gather data for improving veterinary care and research, Executive Director Brendan Wiley told the Bridge during a call.
The Waco City Council backed the project Sept. 16 with $45,000 in funding. Five TSTC robotics students will spend the next three semesters scaling up prototypes before their introduction into the elephant exhibit.
Wiley believes this may be the first project of its kind at a U.S. zoo.
Mayo, along with fellow TSTC robotics instructor Bobby Crawford, will be leading the effort. And if the robo scoopers prove useful and result in any new intellectual property, “the intellectual property will belong to them,” Wiley said.
While development is still in its early stages, students have already settled on a name: FRANK, short for “Fecal Remover And Nastiness Killer.”
“I told them to keep it family-friendly, because some of them are teenage boys and they were coming up with some weird stuff,” Mayo said.
For the time being, TSTC instructors are managing their limited project budget by providing the students with small, off-the-shelf wheeled robotic kits powered by an Arduino unit, an affordable and easily programmable computer brain.
“Each one will get assigned a different sensor to the program, and then they’ll teach everybody else how it works,” Crawford said. “So that’s where the team building skills and teaching element come in.”
Project leaders are aiming for robots about 4 feet long, able to scoop 5 to 8 pounds of waste.
Because FRANK is unlikely to survive a stomp from the world’s heaviest land-dwelling mammal or a skewering via the animal’s twin tusks, the college team is exploring a different option to improve the scooper’s odds of survival.
Another robot could distract Tembo with a mechanical arm flinging grapes, the elephant’s favorite snack, Mayo said.
The idea that it might be possible to have an elephant co-habitate with a small, custodial robot was inspired by zoo staff observations of another animal interaction.
Cameron Park Zoo has long dealt with resident vultures landing and gathering inside exhibits, Wiley said, “and you’d think the animals would shoo the vultures away, but they don’t. They’re extremely tolerant of that.”
“Then we thought if we can give the robotic device positively reinforcing attributes, maybe we can solve key issues for our team, and at the same time improve the quality of the space the animals are living in,” he said.
Thermal imaging could alert zoo veterinarians to possible sicknesses, as could live video cameras frequently analyzing changes in the animal’s gait, Wiley added. “The amount of health data related to our animals could potentially be enormous.”
Elephants will be the first animals to encounter FRANK, followed by large herbivores, including rhinos, giraffes and hoof stock, depending on the robot’s performance.
“Carnivores present a little different challenge,” Wiley said. “But, you know, at some point, why not explore that too?”
Disclosure: Texas State Technical College is a financial supporter of The Waco Bridge, a nonprofit news organization that is funded in part by donations from individual donors, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Bridge’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
