Baldwin Park, Orlando, Florida

cnr of Corrine Drive and Bennet Road

Tuesday MARCH 11: The Florida Operation

Fourteen students gathered at the Florida Film Festival headquarters to adapt a pack of commercially available toy robotic dog -- to upgrade the raison d'etre of their robots. They equipped the toys with a new nose (environment toxin sensor), and a new brain (microprocessor), and have mechanically upgraded (hotroded) the dogs so they can now navigate any outdoor terrain. The new brain changes the dogs behavior : each is now programmed to follow concentration gradients of the material (VOCs*) they are sensing i.e. they appear to be sniffing out a toxic trail.

Wed March 12: The Release Preparations

The students have prepared their robots to perform on a couple of 'sites of community interest'. Including a new residential development near the center of Orlando: Baldwin Park, and a childrens play ground adjacent to Lake Ivanhoe with pressure treated wood recently closed
Built atop an old Naval base the dogs will first be released on the future site of the Baldwin Park middle school which is adjacent to the old naval landfill. In the search for inexpensive real estate, many schools in the US have been built on old landfill and hazardous waste disposal sites [Hamden middle school, CT for example, and LA school district]. There is known drycleaning fluid contamination at the Baldwin Park development at or near the old landfill site. The developers have reportedly covered the land fill with a further 2 ft of soil.

The dogs will investigate.

Wed March 12: The Florida Feral Robotic Dog Pact Release
Rendezvous : 12:00 noon March 12

The feral robotic dog pack release is intended to provide an opportunity for evidence driven discussion of the environmental issues facing the community, and the opportunity to coordinate diverse opinions and interpretations of the phenomena at hand.
Because the dog’s space-filling logic emulates a familiar behavior, i.e. “sniffing something out”, anyone can participate and try to make sense of this data in real time without necessarily having the technical or scientific training usually required to interpret data from other sources on the same phenomena. It has the potential to raise the standards of evidence involved, promote diverse valid interpretations involved in complex environmental and political processes.

Volatile Organics

http://www.baldwinparkfl.com/web/