Robot Eats Flies to Generate Power 410
ms47 writes "Interesting little story over at MSNBC today about 'robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations.' The neat part is it's powered by 'catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells.'"
Re:They're called, "Flowers" (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed. That may, in fact, be the very inspiration for this device, as flowers that attract flies and digest them smell like. .
Go figure.
KFG
Gastrobots (Score:5, Informative)
Robots that have biotic stomachs are sometimes called 'Gastrobots'. There is a paper from MIT [mit.edu] on the subject. Another paper from some guy at USF [usf.edu] has this choice quote:
This is not a unique insight but it is funny if you misread it as "biological examples, e.g. Beer".
Re:No need to smell like shit... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No need to smell like shit... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let us not forget phase I: (Score:1, Informative)
Project Home Page (Score:3, Informative)
-Lucas
Re:They're called, "Flowers" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No need to smell like shit... (Score:2, Informative)
This all is also why you tend to get bit more if you're being active outdoors, because you're not only sweating more, you're breathing more too.
Maybe when they get farther in figuring out what exactly attracts mosquitos the most they can make a robot that eats mosquitos as well as flies. Until then, I'm perfectly content with there being a few less flies buzzing around (hey, it's not like it's difficult for them to reproduce, just slap a rotting carcass on the ground somewhere).
Re:OK, how old... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Asimov, and Content... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:human powered (Score:2, Informative)
A picture of the robot (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No need to smell like shit... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They're called, "Flowers" (Score:4, Informative)
Just in case you don't think the poster is serious: he's dead [luckymojo.com] serious [ncbuy.com].
Won't somebody think of the children^W butterflies^W raccoons?!