Kawasaki has unveiled the world's first rideable ... goat ...?
It was viewed at a trade show in Japan, and looks like those robot dogs made by Boston Dynamics, you remember Spot? But it's got the head of a goat, and you can ride it like a horse.
The feature’s it consists of is Light up horns, it walks on all four legs, it also has wheels on its knees that make it roll faster and it carries approximately 100kg or roughly 220 lbs.
So, why would they create such a strange robot? Well, this Kawasaki Bex is inspired by Ibex (wild goat that are in Asia, Africa, and Europe) in very mountainous areas showing their toughness. The engineers created the Bex to assist farmers with the transport of heavy crops and surveillance of the crops using an integrated camera in the Bex. Cool, right?!
There are some huge advantages like, a farmer can see them whilst they are carrying crops in the dark (due to the lights in their neck and horns) the Bex doesn’t need to be domesticated at an early age like a real animal would. A farmer doesn't have to wait for the ibex to grow strong enough to be put into use. There's also no need to take out resources and feed them specific foods.
But just like anything, there are disadvantages too. A piece of technology like this doesn't come cheap so some farmers who could really benefit from this robot, might not be able to afford it. Farmers would know how to maintain the ibex and it would take time to figure out either how to fix it or to get it fixed and updated all the time. When the Bex in need of a charge it might be hard to get it back to the charging location if it dies out on the field. New manufacturing facilities that would be needed to create more of these robots means more pollution caused by the transport of resources and air and noise pollution in the local surrounding areas.
I think it could definitely be worth it though if they can figure out some of the little downsides to this product. Helping farmers should definitely be on the priority list for engineers in our world.
What do you think?