Robot Eats Flies to Generate Power

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"

[kfg]

The answer is flowers!

Indeed. That may, in fact, be the very inspiration for this device, as flowers that attract flies and digest them smell like. . .shit and rotting meat.

Go figure.

KFG

Gastrobots

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

Few robotics engineers would disagree that robot development has often been inspired by biological examples (Beer et al., 1997)

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mosquitos are attracted by CO2 which this thing probably puts out. Still, flies are much juicer than mosquitos, unless the mosquito got to you first.

Re:No need to smell like shit...

[kiddygrinder]

Actually, i believe mosquitos are attracted to carbon dioxide.

Re:Let us not forget phase I:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go: link [uwe.ac.uk]. Even has a photo.

Project Home Page

[Nintendork]

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory at University of the West of England is where this robot is being developed. Here's a link to their homepage [uwe.ac.uk]. They have a projects section that has more information.

-Lucas

Re:They're called, "Flowers"

[NoMercy]

Your general flowers will attract wasps, bees and butterflys, when you want to attract the less wholesome type of fly you need there favorite food, so that's shit and rotting carcas smell :)

Re:No need to smell like shit...

[Reene]

They're attracted to a variety of things, not just carbon dioxide. Certain pheromones and the chemicals we secrete in our sweat attract them just as well if not better than breathing. The reason certain body sprays can work (to an extent) is because they clog pores rather badly. Scientists are still trying to figure out what exactly attracts mosquitos so they can figure out a way to repel them properly.

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...

[liam_p]

This is being developed at my university (uwe) although we didn't get a mention in the article! :-( Anyway, yeh, they've been working on it for a while. Not sure about 7 but at least around 5 years ago. The original was a slugbot. An article in the guardian in 2000 makes reference to it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 101493,00.html [guardian.co.uk] Or you could go straight to the lab ;-) http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/ [uwe.ac.uk] And for the guy complaining that solar is better. They do solar too :-)

Re:Asimov, and Content...

[liam_p]

Yes, look at the lab website. http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/ [uwe.ac.uk]

Re:human powered

[wwwgregcom]

Is this a joke? Robots wouldn't eat humans for the same reason nothing else does. It's inefficient. A robot could easily obtain more energy from the first trophic level such as grains or other plants. We are what, second level consumers? Sometimes even third? Everything that wants energy on the food chain follows the same rules. Robot or animal.

A picture of the robot

[mrthoughtful]

Here is a PDF File from the project owners, including photo. [aber.ac.uk]

Re:No need to smell like shit...

[ntb]

Why smell? A uv lamp cand atract insects (like the UV insect killers [cybermarket.co.uk]) and for long periods Electricity is easier to generate than smell.

Re:They're called, "Flowers"

[RobertB-DC]

Well, the symbolism should be obvious, and it was a lot better than the old tradition of giving them animal sex organs. If you think roses don't look very good in a vase after a week...

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?!