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EcoBot II: Brits Design Fly Eating RobotIt may eat flies and stink to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous.
To survive without human help, a robot needs to be able to generate its own energy. So Chris Melhuish and his team of robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are developing a robot that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell that generates electricity.
So what is the downside? The robot will most likely have to attract the hapless flies by using a stinking lure concocted from human excrement.
Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry out remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations. Sensors on the robot feed a data logger that periodically radios the results back to a base station.
The robot's energy source is the sugar in the polysaccharide called chitin that makes up a fly's exoskeleton. EcoBot II digests the flies in an array of eight microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which use bacteria from sewage to break down the sugars, releasing electrons that drive an electric current (see graphic).
In its present form, EcoBot II still has to be manually fed fistfuls of dead bluebottles, but the
more: www.newscientist.com/news/news.js... (318)
September 10, 2004 | Viewed 20,091 time(s)
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