2024 Year in Review

 

 

 

written: November 18, 2024

Now that the rowing season is coming to an end, let's reflect back on the progress we made with the Smart Goose Deterrent System in 2024.

We appreciate working with the Riverside Boat Club in Cambridge, MA. They provided an ideal environment for testing: lots of geese, rowers, cooperation, and feedback.

SGDS started as an idea in February, and quickly evolved into a system that worked remarkably well.

All along the way, we examined every frame of data collected by SGDS, to make sure it was behaving as desired. We needed to teach the AI how to deal with some interesting situations:

• penguins do not live in Boston
• great blue herons are our friends
• light reflections off the water are not flocks of small birds
• spiders crawling over the camera lens need to be dealt with

We learned that geese are very persistent. They constantly tested the boundaries of SGDS sprinklers. They learned exactly where they could hang out and be safe. On some mornings, you could see what looked like a hundred geese swimming by the dock, just out of range of sprinklers.

We tallied data from the 2nd half of the season. Geese visited at all hours of the day, mostly when people were not there. A lot of rowers launch from the RBC docks between 5AM and 9AM.

SGDS found geese ~1400 times. On the busiest day, they visited 77 times.

 

If you believe a goose produces 1 pound of poop per day, typically hangs out for 3 hours per visit, and travels in groups of 4 or more: that comes to 700 pounds of poop that did not end up on the dock! Again, that's only half a season.

On these cold November mornings, SGDS is shut down. Sadly, the geese are back and they are making a mess of RBC's dock. The cold weather rowers have had to learn to sweep poop again (and they might not be as quick to learn as the geese). We are happy knowing SGDS made a difference for RBC this season and look forward to doing battle again next year.