SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.
Over at the firm's Machine Learning and Optimization group, a researcher saw squirrels stealing flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. The research team trained a computer vision model to detect squirrels, and then put it onto a Raspberry Pi 3 board. Whenever an adventurous rodent happened by, it would turn on the sprinkler system.
Microsoft's sciurine aversions aren't the point of that story – its shoehorning of a convolutional neural network onto an ARM CPU is. It shows how organizations are pushing hardware further to support AI algorithms. As AI continues to make the headlines, researchers are pushing its capabilities to make it increasingly competent at basic tasks such as recognizing vision and speech.
Do you go with the cloud, GPUs, FPGAs, or other?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 24 2017, @05:56PM
Yes, Deer sprinklers and Rabbit Sprinklers are a thing. Even Amazon [amazon.com] carries them.
Difference is these wet down anything that moves.
You sort of don't want to chase the birds from the bird feeder, but everything else is fair game. Birds are not a particularly difficult thing to distinguish, and would be easier to teach a computer to recognize the bird than it would be to recognize a squirrel. Bird / Not Bird is easy.
The sensors available for the Raspberry PI are pretty amazing, and available from multiple sources:
https://www.dexterindustries.com/GrovePi/supported-sensors/ [dexterindustries.com]
https://www.adafruit.com/category/35 [adafruit.com]
Some of these can be made to operate in weird and serendipitous ways. My photographer friend uses the Grove Ultrasonic Ranger to differentiate between humming birds and other birds by wing beat frequency for photography purposes.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.