Sunday 7 June 2009

Free (canine) energy

People like having dogs as pets. Dogs need walking. People don't always have enough time to walk their dog. We need more energy. Inference of this collection of facts: put the dog in a giant hamster wheel and let it exercise itself and generate electricity at the same time. Alternatively a roller-bed could be used. Dogs may need some encouragement to do this electricity generation, perhaps the metaphorical carrot on a stick could be used. Or train it young.

1 comment:

adreama said...

On the motivation side, perhaps there could be some kind of auto-treat functionality, i.e. the machine releases a dog treat (food) without human intervention. Obviously there will be some Pavlovian association between using the treadmill and getting treats. It may be possible to program some kind of Pavlov optimisation algorithm that takes inputs like duration of exercise, speed, reductions in speed, etc to maximise the amount of exercise per treat (and to continue to enhance this optimisation over time by tracking the data). In the generator is used by multiple dogs then the machine would need to "learn" the behaviour of each dog, and would need a mechanism to recognise the dogs (e.g. RFID tag on collar).

This concept could be expanded to other animals, perhaps horses. I'm not sure it would be possible with cats, but perhaps with a Pavlov optimisation algorithm...