Cory Doctorow

HACKING

THE DOG

Who says you have to spend thousands of dollars to get a cool robot? The world’s toy stores brim with cheap-ass, rough-and-ready robotic platforms just begging to be modded.

NATALIE JEREMIJENKO, A YALE ENGINEERING

professor, invented Feral Robot Dogs as a pedagogical exercise. Engineering profs would love to get their kids to build sophisticated bots like the Sony Aibo, but they’re pricey as hell, and Sony has a history of threatening legal action against people who publish how-tos and code for hacking your Aibo.

Sony’s Aibos are expensive toys, controlled from afar by the company’s Attack Lawyers. Jeremijenko’s dogs are cheap, out-of-control, and anything but toys.

Jeremijenko gives her students a selection of $20 toy dogs, the kind of thing that barks the national anthem or whizzes in circles, and asks her kids to take them to bits and divine what they can about the production design that went into the toys, to learn what they can about how mass-produced products are engineered.

Now the fun begins. First, the robots are modded with new drivetrains and fat wheels for rugged off-roading. Next, the students select sensors for their dogs: the sensor of choice is a Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) sniffer that can be had for a few dollars. VOCs are highly toxic chemicals released in urban environments by dry cleaners, power plants, and other polluters. The VOC sensors are the “noses” for the students’ dogs, and they’re connected to “brains” — low-cost programmable interrupt controllers that are configured to follow concentration gradients from the sensors, steering the dogs toward ever-higher levels of pollutants.

Once a pack of dogs is ready, Jeremijenko and students repair to a site suspected of containing VOCs. One such site was the Bronx’s Starlight Park, which had been converted to a park after serving as a conEdison industrial site. The EPA had done a soil survey and given the park a clean

22 Make: Volume 01

bill, but the Feral Dogs told another story: once released onto the turf, the dogs quickly converged on several toxic hotspots the Feds had missed.

Not surprising, really, since Feral Robot Dogs sample every 6cm, while the EPA’s patented Guy-with-a-Clipboard method is accurate to 4m. What’s more, the Robot Dogs have the quality Jeremijenko calls “legibility” — an unskilled person can examine their behavior and read it, understanding that the spot where all the robots have

“The EPA gave the park

a clean bill, but the Feral

Dogs quickly converged

on several toxic hotspots

the Feds had missed.”

converged is the spot with the invisible, deadly toxic waste. Compare this with the EPA’s method, in which the numbers on the clipboard and their interpretation are strictly the domain of experts, and the rest of us can only rely on their assurances that all is well.

The Feral Robotics movement is thriving, and its web hub ( xdesign.eng.yale.edu/feralrobots) teems with how-tos and information on sourcing parts, contributed by Feral Roboticists around the world. Get modding!

Photograph courtesy of Natalie Jeremijenko

Cory Doctorow ( craphound.com) is European Affairs Co-ordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( eff.org), a co-editor at Boing Boing (boingboing. net), and an award-win-ning science fiction writer ( craphound.com/est). He lives in London, England.