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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 10 2017, @03:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the articles-for-the-birds dept.

Spotted at Hackaday is a story on positive reinforcement to train crows to pick up litter:

A Dutch startup wants to teach the crow population to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for bird treats.

The whole Corvidae family of birds is highly intelligent so it shouldn’t be a problem training them that they will get a reward for depositing something the Hominidae family regularly throw on the street where the birds live. This idea is in turn an evolution of the open-source Crow Box.

For some, leveraging the intelligence of animals is more appealing than programming drones which could do the same thing. A vision system mixed with a drone and a manipulator could fulfull[sic] the same function but animals are self-repairing and autonomous without our code. The irony of this project is that, although it's probably fairly easy to train crows to recognize cigarette butts, the implementation hinges on having a vision system that can recognize the butts in order to properly train the crows in the first place.


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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by sjames on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:28PM

    by sjames (2882) on Tuesday October 10 2017, @08:28PM (#580026) Journal

    I don't smoke, but I do find it funny to mime smoking sometimes just to watch passers by pointedly hacking up a lung.

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