By: Evan Ackerman | Posted 17 Oct 2011
“This could be it, folks. The one killer application that the entire robotics world has been waiting for. It’s bold, it’s daring, it’s potentially transformative, and you know you want it.
It’s POOP.
Ben Cohen and his colleagues from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania devoted literally an entire weekend to programming their PR2 robot, Graspy, to handle POOPs. POOPs (Potentially Offensive Objects for Pickup) are managed by the robot using a customized POOP SCOOP (Perception Of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control Of Object Pickup) routine. While POOP can be just about anything that you’d rather not have to pick up yourself, in this particular case, the POOP does happen to be poop, since arguably, poop is the worst kind of POOP.
Oh yes, there absolutely is video.”