Most people, when they put together a scarecrow, find some straw, some old pants and paint a funny face on it. South Koreans build an autonomous robot with dazzling lasers and acoustic weapons.
KBS
Although to be fair, this thing is designed to do a lot more than drive birds away from corn fields.
Specifically, it’s built to drive birds away from airports and military bases. Bird strikes are actually incredibly dangerous to aircraft, and the bird doesn’t exactly do well with it either. Nor is it built to fry the birds or make their ears bleed.
Instead, it uses crazed laser patterns to disturb the birds, and loud popping noises of up to 100 dB to get them to fly away and bug somebody else, preferably somebody with some corn.
They are somewhat human-controlled, but they can also work autonomously and go from point A to point B without assistance. In the future, they’ll likely be used for military purposes, but for now, we’ve got one bizarre scarecrow on our hands. Maybe we can equip it with machine guns to kill flying monkeys?
Scarecrow Laser Tank! [Gizmodo]