Pepper the parrot was a pain. The problem? Pepper wouldn't shut up. From such annoyance flew the inspiration for an invention called the Bird Buggy.
"Our parrot, when he's left alone, screams. It's ear-piercing even if you're several rooms away," Pepper's owner, Andrew Gray, a University of Florida electrical- and computer-engineering student, told his school's radio station, WUFT.
To alleviate the squawking, Gray built a small cart Pepper can drive easily with his beak. It's a distraction to give the grey plumed bird something to occupy his time. Sure enough, Pepper took to cruising around on four wheels, driving the small, boxy blue buggy by way of a beak-steered joystick control. Suddenly the bird is a whole lot quieter.
But the Bird Buggy, as our mates at Wired UK noted, wasn't Gray's first shot at using tech to calm Pepper down.
"What we normally do is spray him with a water bottle and it shuts him up for a little bit," Gray told WUFT. "So I built a voice-activated squirt gun. It worked really well at first, but then he started using it as a bird bath and would scream just to get squirted."
Talk about a backfire. After the squirt gun solution dried up, Gray had to dig deeper to find a fix.
"What's the underlying issue? The problem is that he's not in the room with us," Gray said. "When he's in the room he's fine, so I thought, 'How do I get him around the house?'"
So, after four months of design work, Gray brought the Bird Buggy from concept to reality, complete with infrared sensors that keep Pepper from ramming into a wall or other obstacles in the home. And when Pepper decides to ditch his ride, the buggy can even park itself, using a homing device Gray has built into a docking station and cameras built into the buggy, so the cart can see where it's headed.
Gray has posted a video of Pepper driving the Bird Buggy, and the buggy driving itself, on YouTube. Check it out below.
