Comments on: Parrot drives robotic bird buggy

By: Tim Ortiz

Tim Ortiz — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:55:00 +0000

cars for birds?!

By: ARMed_Pirate

ARMed_Pirate — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 02:37:00 +0000

“Check out Chickey, drivin’ Piggy’s little blue car.
Nobody taught him how.”
–The Presidents of the United States of America, “Feather Pluckin’”

By: CLamb

CLamb — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 20:25:00 +0000

Part of the problem is that birds lack an anal sphincter such as humans have. They can only control their deposit of droppings through control of intestinal contractions — a much harder set of muscles to consciously control.

By: Scott Rose

Scott Rose — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:25:00 +0000

Smart enough to drive, yet needs newspaper under him to stop from sh*tting on his own car. Yup, that’s a parrot.

By: edgore

edgore — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:07:00 +0000

“a preference for left-turns.”

So, what you are saying is that he is fully qualified to be a NASCAR driver.

By: edgore

edgore — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:05:00 +0000

But probably the Singularity we deserve.

By: LBalsam

LBalsam — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:20:00 +0000

Kickstarter please – I have 2 birds and I would buy this.

The bird is definitely smart enough to drive and I think mine would be too. I love the newspaper tray for “droppings”.

By: robcat2075

robcat2075 — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 02:30:00 +0000

Your claim was that there was “no evidence”. The video presents some evidence. Seeing the whole unedited video would give us more evidence either way, but we have a little evidence about how the bird behaves now.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 23:39:00 +0000

There would need to be a saddle and reins to complete the picture.

By: bcsizemo

bcsizemo — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:53:00 +0000

I think Mr. Gray would win the entire internet for life if he was able to pull that off.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:36:00 +0000

Preferably, this quad-copter.

By: CLamb

CLamb — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:44:00 +0000

I’m guessing the bird’s flight feathers have been clipped rendering it unable to fly. This is commonly done with large pet birds.

By: Boundegar

Boundegar — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:25:00 +0000

And we wonder why over 60% of American birds are obese.

By: MonkeyBoy

MonkeyBoy — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:21:00 +0000

That “turning the cart aligning” could have easily been random or dependent on what I perceived as a preference for left-turns.

Who knows how many minutes of video there are where the bird gets stuck and has to be repositioned.

By: drinkingcoffee

drinkingcoffee — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:51:00 +0000

The next step, obviously, is to mount the perch on a quad-copter

By: robcat2075

robcat2075 — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:29:00 +0000

That he turned the cart to align it with the pavement so he could go farther forward would be one data point of “evidence”.

But is “play” not a stepping stone to “use”? It is for children.

By: Sean Nelson

Sean Nelson — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:17:00 +0000

Not bad for a grad student’s parents.

By: MonkeyBoy

MonkeyBoy — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:07:00 +0000

There is no evidence that the bird is driving the cart as opposed to just causing it to randomly move.

If the owner had like put some treats or toys on a chair and the bird made a beeline to it then I would accept that it was using the cart and not just playing with it.

By: GawainLavers

GawainLavers — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:06:00 +0000

Hey, they share the same last name…

By: Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:49:00 +0000

Can I just say, nice house for a grad student?

By: Felton / Moderator

Felton / Moderator — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:35:00 +0000

Not the singularity we were expecting, but we’ll take what we can get.

By: Charles Richter

Charles Richter — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:27:00 +0000

This really makes me curious to know how much the parrot understands about its ability to control the path of the buggy. Is it just wiggling the stick around and enjoying the ride, or can it, with intent, steer the buggy to a desired location? I imagine that one way to get some idea of intentionality could be to include a tracking mechanism on the buggy, so that the human operator could compare the trips the bird takes and see if there are any patterns. Apparent patterns could of course be incidental to stick-wiggling, though, so there’s definitely room for improvement in this methodology. I wonder if there is some goal that the parrot could be enticed to reach with the buggy, but discouraged from simply flying to it?

By: Kevin Pierce

Kevin Pierce — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:23:00 +0000

Pepper also requests the addition of stereo system to Bird Buggy, for booming dubstep, and several to-scale gold necklaces with chunky symbols attached, cause that's how we roll!

By: Adam Rice

Adam Rice — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:16:00 +0000

The cart is nice work, but the most interesting thing about this is that a bird capable of flight sees this cart as an interesting enough toy to choose to maneuver it.

By: robcat2075

robcat2075 — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:06:00 +0000

So this is how “flightless bird” species begin to evolve.

Very impressive demonstration. I wonder if the bird will become less tentative with his driving as he gains experience. Or perhaps he just needs a more stable way to sit on it than a dowel. The high vantage point is amplifying any slight tilt or bump the car goes over, perhaps that bothers him too.

By: edgore

edgore — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:04:00 +0000

For just a moment I thought we had created a robotic bird that could be driven insane.

By: Sylvia

Sylvia — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:57:00 +0000

That’s probably the cutest thing I’ve seen all week.