ButtBot: Telepresence Game

So I was walking around campus and we had just been working with kids downtown at the Mission Discovery program … I was noticing all of these cigarette butts on the ground and thought, “Hey! This is a great opportunity for an anti-littering bot. People love to play that cheesy pick-up-claw game at the arcade, maybe they would want to clean up their neighborhood at the same time!”

ButtBot is a game played with a telepresence bot (like the Qwerk bot in the picture above). It has a pick-up arm like the ones you can buy from Home depot for $10-20, cut apart and controlled with servoes. You log in and get a ButtBot in your neighborhood—it’s like ZipCar—and you play it for kicks or to see who can pick up the most. You drive it left, right, forward , and back, and there’s a button—like in the arcade—to make the “claw” come down and try to pick up the butt.

Maybe there is also a bucket on the back (see Post-it) to collect butts in while you're playing. Then there’s another button that makes the ButtBot say “Help! Please empty me!” to a passerby when you see someone walk by. :-)

Thanks to Ian Ingram for the name “ButtBot”!

Posted 10 months ago by dholstiu

Tagged with: buttbot cigarettes fun game litter mobile qwerk telepresence