Almost all of us are science fans and sometimes we think that to do science you have to be in a multinational or a gigantic company with a lot of money, with tremendous cutting-edge technology and sometimes just having ingenuity is enough, sometimes someone with a good idea can defeat an entire technological giant because they have simply found a practical solution to a real problem, like the following example.
Boston Dynamics is one of the pioneering companies in the development of robots, no one disputes that its creations are of great quality and high technology, but it has always had problems making its creations profitable, they are very expensive. Boston Dynamics is currently 80% owned by the Korean company, Hyundai, so some are hopeful that Boston Dynamics will finally make a profit from what it is doing.
For one thing, their works, their creations are extremely expensive, they are practically luxury items. I don't know how, I doubt it, really, because until now they have had dollars, financing and good engineers, but they have always lacked the perspective of practicality and that is essential because they get medals for overcoming technological challenges, but it seems that at Boston Dynamics it seems that they have forgotten their obligation as engineers who want to bring products to the market and to do so they have to provide solutions to real problems.
You cannot release luxury, extremely expensive products if in the end the problem is not solved, the problem in question is that the United States Air Force has given Boston Dynamics a slap in the face of reality, the Air Force and in general the entire aviation sector in the world has a very serious problem with wild birds around airports. According to the United States Air Force website, since 1995 there have been more than 69,000 incidents of strikes with what they call wildlife, that is, birds.
These incidents have caused the death of 23 airmen, the destruction of 12 aircraft and more than 400 million in damage. Birds cause more damage than many wars in which the United States has been involved. In each country they have chosen to apply several solutions. All solutions have their limitations or costs and it is normal to apply several at the same time.
The United States Air Force thought it would be a good idea to buy robotic dogs from Boston Dynamics to scare away birds, but the first problem they had is that these Boston Dynamics robots were very expensive, they cost about $74,500 each, about €68,000 in exchange, it is not for everyone's budget, the second problem they had with the ones they initially bought for testing is that they are very slow, their speed is 5.8 km/h, so The birds that are not stupid, once they verified that these robots did not run much, the only thing the birds did was move a few meters, in practice, these robot dogs the only thing they managed to do was push the birds from one place to another and when the robot moved to scare them away from the new place, the birds returned to the previous place.
In short, the birds were trolling the robots, but the Air Force experts, the engineers there, looked for a practical solution and created the Coyote Rovers, something great, ingenious, but practical, it is a very simple design; It is a radio-controlled car that any fan can buy in a supermarket or toy store. They are not cheap cars, but they are affordable.
What they did next was place a plastic coyote purchased for forestry and farm material on top. They simply placed the coyote in the radio-controlled car and the result was a remote-controlled coyote that terrified the birds by running at about 35 km/h and that barely cost $2,500. Now they are thinking about adding artificial intelligence so that it can function autonomously without the need for a human controller.
Even with the application of artificial intelligence, the coyote rover would be much cheaper than the Boston Dynamics robot dog, and most importantly, it provides a solution to the problem and here Boston has had a slap in the face of reality because it has lost a fairly juicy contract. Imagine the number of robot dogs that it could have sold to all the air bases of the United States air forces and then if that worked, then to all the airports in the United States and other countries.
These robot dogs have solved that problem, there were other solutions such as the issue of falcons and each solution has its limitations, the problem with falcons is that they operate in a certain area and you have to stop the air traffic so that the falcon can act, because otherwise the falcon can crash into a plane and if you have the circumstance that you happen to be managing an active runway and you discover that there is a flock of birds, you cannot stop the air traffic at that moment, you have to have a solution quick, like for example sending one of these robot coyotes.
This solution is ingenious to show you that sometimes you don't need to have a big company behind you, but rather the important thing is to have entrepreneurship and good ideas to solve a real problem.
