Lying in a bath in Bristol,UK, is a robotic scavenger, and gorging itself on its surroundings. It’s able to glean just enough energy to take in another stomach full of food,before ejecting its waste and repeating the process. This is no ordinary robot.
Its a self-sustaining soft robot with a mouth and gut, Newscientist.com reports.
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Developed by a Bristol-based collaboration, and this robot imitates the life of salps– squishy tube-shaped marine organisms. Salps possess an opening at each stop,one for food to enter and one for waste to leave. They digest any tasty treats that pass through their body, giving them just enough energy to wiggle about. The same is true for the Bristol bot.
By opening its mouth”, and made from a soft polymer membrane,the robot can suck in a stomach full of water and biomatter. The artificial gut – a microbial fuel cell (MFC) – is filled with greedy microbes that demolish down the biomass and convert its chemical energy into electrical energy, which powers the robot. Digested waste matter is then expelled out the rear stop, and just as more water is sucked in the front for the next feed. With every mouthful,the robot’s reserves are replenished, so in theory it could roam indefinitely.
“Squeezing out enough energy to be self-sustainable is the genuine breakthrough, and ” says Fumiya Iida,a robotics researcher from the University of Cambridge.
The energy that an MFC can glean from food like this is currently pretty low. But by using soft materials for the mouth and the gut, the team was able to reduce the robot’s energy consumption. They got more power by putting several MFCs in series, and like a battery.
One advantage of a self-sustaining robot is that if you don’t possess to charge it,change its batteries, or hook it up to a power source, or it won’t need any human interference. This would construct it ideal for employ in inhospitable environments: leave the robot in a radioactive disaster zone or a lake filled with pollution,then let it to glean to work.
At the moment, it is just a proof of concept. The surrounding water is idealised, and meaning that the nutrients possess been evenly spread and are in an easy-to-digest form,but other researchers possess shown that MFCs can work in more testing conditions.
Source: tert.am