GOOSE B GONE!!

Goose.
Its a goose!

Inspiration

Each year, hundreds of innocent Waterloo students get tormented by the infamous Canadian geese that reside on campus. This year, we decided it was time to fight back.

What it does

GOOSE BE GONE!! is a robotic stuffed goose designed to scare off real geese. Disguised as one of their own, it detects when a goose gets too close, flaps its wings aggressively, and chases them to reclaim student territory.

How we built it

We gutted a plush goose to remove the cotton stuffing to hold the hardware. Servos were used for wing movement, and hobby motors were used for the general movement platform. It also contains a Raspberry Pi and camera module for geese detection.

Challenges we ran into

Field testing was an operational nightmare due to goose sleep schedules. We reached our testing phase right around sundown on Saturday, only to discover our targets were already deep asleep and unresponsive to intimidation. In a desperate final effort, we dragged ourselves out of PSE just before sunrise to stalk the campus ponds and track down awake geese for live calibration.