Reblogged from heathernicolezilla August 26th, 2010 at 2:16 pm Notes #science #engineering #robotsMIT unveils swimming, oil-cleaning robots!
(CNN) — Here’s a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.
Instead, just deploy an army of autonomous, oil-scrubbing robots. They can find the oil on their own. And when they reach the site of an oil spill, they talk to their robot friends to figure out the best way to get the whole thing mopped up.
That’s the vision the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward on Wednesday as the school announced the development of a prototypical robot called Seaswarm. The $20,000 robots will be unveiled officially to the public on Saturday at an event in Venice, Italy, and will be ready to deal with oil spills in about a year, said Assaf Biderman, who oversaw MIT’s research team on the project.
Read more: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/08/26/mit.oil.robot/index.html#fbid=NVpNtj7mhnb&wom=false
