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Drone pet waste collection
Because, apparently, garbage bins are just too damn expensive or inconvenient to keep at most public parks | |
I've noticed an increase in 2 things lately: parks with no garbage bins and neatly tied poo bags discarded on the ground around these parks. This tells me that pet owners are civic minded enough to pickup after their pet, but not willing to haul a bag of shit in their car when they leave. This seems
eminently reasonable to me. But that begs the question... who picks up those little bags? From the amount and apparent age of some of the ones I've seen, it appears nobody's doing it.
Now, littering is technically still illegal, and while it seems not to be enforced much, I'm sure none of these pet owners are thrilled with the prospect of getting caught throwing trash on the ground. So, what to do?
I've noticed an increase in a third thing lately as well, and that is residential poop scooping services. I see their trucks EVERYWHERE, which tells me that people are willing to pay to have their pets picked up after. This gave me an idea for a new kind of business that leverages modern technology. I would sell poop bags with a proprietary color scheme (maybe, if it's cheap enough, embedded RFID chips) which can be left anywhere in a public park with sufficient clearance around it for a drone to land, and a couple times a day at scheduled intervals, our drones fly over every public park in the city scanning the ground for our bags and pick them up. We would negotiate an agreement with the city for our bags to be exempted from littering laws in places our drones are permitted to operate.
There are a few possible business models. The service can be paid for with higher upfront purchase cost for the bags, or with a monthly/annual subscription. A cursory search tells me that commercially available drones with up to a 5 lb cargo capacity can have a range of up to 18 miles, which means with just a few trucks serving as mobile drop and recharge stations parked around a city, we could cover a vast area with pretty few resources.
Dog Doo MBA
[pocmloc, Mar 29 2025]
[link]
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If you use bags of an unusual and highly visible color I think AI is now good enough for full automation of picking up the bags and dropping them into the back of a truck. |
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That was my thought as well. |
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Just watch out for when it grabs Mrs Murphy's orange scarf and steals her wig. |
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Something about questionably-tied bags of shit flying over my head seems a bit... unnerving. |
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The thought was that it would be stored internally, to prevent such nightmare scenarios. |
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Some thoughts:
1: If the local council won't provide bins, just offer a "Bin Supply & Collection" contract; saves all that high tech drone stuff.
2: Flying takes a lot of energy. A wheeled pooper-scooper/bag-collector robot would be more efficient, since the poop will be on the ground.
3: A "dog detecting" wheeled robot (wheeled since a dog is also on the ground) could simply follow any dog it detects & either automatically clean up, or simply offer a bag & receptacle for the owner to use.
4: Dog poop is somewhat odorous; are "electronic noses" at an advanced-enough stage that RFID & special colours aren't necessary? |
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If the city saw it as an issue worth spending money on, I imagine they would already have put bins out. The idea here is to appeal directly to the citizens who walk their dogs in these spaces. The pitch to the city is that this doesn't cost them anything. |
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Just imagine the drone hitting something random, and flipping a bit. The shit would really hit the fan then... |
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