LOLing all day: Are you tired of refilling your red Solo cups after every round of beer pong? With the Pissbot 9000, your cup-filling days are over. Just set your spent Solos on the floor, and Pissbot will urinate your favorite beverage into them so you’ll automatically be ready for the next round.
Ever since unveiling it in 2017, Boston Dynamics has taught its quadruped robotic dog Spot to do many things. It can open doors. It can clean the house, weed the garden, and skip rope. After releasing an SDK and Spot to the public, others have gotten in on the training. The Massachusetts State Police programmed it to help the bomb squad. Adam Savage trained it to pull a rickshaw. Its talents seem only limited by the imagination. Case in point:
An inventive robot modder named Michael Reeves has trained Spot to pee beer into a red Solo cup on command. That command being setting the cup on the floor for the robot to find. Aptly renamed “Pissbot 9000,” the heavily modified Spot can locate a cup anywhere in the room, position its “penis” over it, and squirt beer into it.
The modifications Reeves had to apply did not simply require attaching a mini-keg to Spot’s back and reprogramming it. He also designed a spout gimbal (penis) for precision aiming the flow. The mechanism uses servos and a solenoid powered by a Raspberry-Pi “vision system” to ensure the robot doesn’t miss the cup.
Additionally, Reeves needed to create a cup tracking mechanism so Spot could find cups from across the room. The stock internal camera has a hard time recognizing the red Solos. However, a higher-quality camera from BD runs almost $30,000. So Reeves decided to MacGyver one using an off-the-shelf home surveillance camera, a wireless dongle, and a long string of AV adapters.
Unfortunately, Reeves says Pissbot 9000 only has an accuracy rating of 35 percent. Other than that, it works “flawlessly”—as long as you don’t mind mostly foam. Spot has no pressure-control mechanics, so the beer shoots out with the force of a Super Soaker. Despite not working perfectly, it is entertaining to see someone put Spot to use on a task that Boston Dynamics definitely does not endorse.
Reeves posted the entire process along with his trademark “colorful” (read: explicit) commentary to YouTube (above). Although it’s just a goof, I’d much rather imagine Spot pissing me a beer than breaking into my house and pulling a Metalhead on me while I sleep.