This afternoon, I saw a post from Science Daily entitled “Artificial Heart to PumpHuman Waste Into Future Robots”; with curiosity I read the whole article and
found out that it is about EcoBot. I find the EcoBot very interesting that’s
why I did a little research and I created a post about it. So here it is.
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| EcoBot III |
EcoBot is short for Ecological Robot and
it refers to a class of energetically autonomous robots that can remain
self-sustainable by collecting their energy from material, mostly waste matter,
in the environment. The only by-product from this process is carbon dioxide,
which would have been produced from the natural biodegradation of the
fuel regardless. This carbon dioxide production belongs to the
immediate carbon cycle of our planet and does not impose to the
already increasing problem of the greenhouse effect.
Clearly, EcoBot is a robot
that can function completely on its own by collecting waste and converting it
into electricity. Researchers in Bristol Robotics Library U.K. (Melhuish,
Greenman, Ieropoulos and Horsfield) developed
one of the first EcoBot the EcoBot-I. It utilized sugar as the fuel and ferricyanide
in the cathode, to perform phototaxis.
The second EcoBot
developed by the same BRL researchers is the EcoBot-II and it was the first
robot in the world to perform sensing, information processing, and
communication and actuation phototaxis, by utilizing unrefined biomass. In
fact, it consumed dead flies, rotten fruits
and crustacean shells as the fuel and oxygen from free air
as the cathode. EcoBot-II operated continuously for 12 days after having been
fed with 8 houseflies of the species Musca domestica (Ieropoulos et al.
2005a, b; Melhuish et al. 2006).
EcoBot-II is the first
practical example of a Symbot (symbiotic robot) that
exhibited artificial symbiosis – the beneficial integration between
the live microbial part and the artificial mechatronic part.
The two
EcoBots do not employ any other form of conventional power supply and do not
require any form of initial charging from an external source. Instead, they are
powered directly by the onboard microbial fuel cells (MFCs). This is in contrast with Gastrobot, which although it was the first example of a practical
application that employed MFCs, it used onboard conventional batteries and
required initial charging from the mains.
EcoBot-III was developed in 2010, as part of a
European FP-6 funded project, by Ieropoulos I., Greenman J., Melhuish C. and
Horsfield I and was the world's first robot to exhibit true
self-sustainability, albeit in primitive form. This robot was capable of
operating within an enclosed environment for 7 days, by collecting its food and
water from the arena environment, metabolizing these through the collection of
48 small-scale Microbial Fuel Cells and excreting the waste by-products at the
end of the day. This work was presented at the Artificial Life XII Conference
that was held in Odense, Denmark between the 19–23 August 2010 and the
scientific paper (Ieropoulos et al. 2010) was published by the MIT Press.
And yesterday (November 7,
2013) as posted by Science Daily, researchers from Bristol (Peter Walters et
al 2013 Bioinspir. Biomim) created a new device capable of pumping human waste into the
"engine room" of a self-sustaining robot.
Modelled on the human heart, the artificial device
incorporates smart materials called shape memory alloys and could be used to
deliver human urine to future generations of EcoBot.
The device has been tested and the results have
been presented today, 8 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration
and Biomimetics.
Researchers based at the Bristol Robotics
Laboratory – a joint venture between the University of the West of England and
University of Bristol have created four generations of EcoBots in the past 10
years, each of which is powered by electricity-generating microbial fuel cells
that employ live microorganisms to digest waste organic matter and generate
low-level power.
In the future, it is believed that EcoBots could be
deployed as monitors in areas where there may be dangerous levels of pollution,
or indeed dangerous predators, so that little human maintenance is needed. It
has already been shown that these types of robots can generate their energy
from rotten fruit and vegetables, dead flies, wastewater, sludge and human
urine.
EcoBot would be very helpful if it reached its full
potential. They can be deployed to dangerous and polluted environment with or
without little involvement from humans. What’s great about EcoBot is their
capability to create or generate their own electricity that will keep them
running. With that, I hope that researchers can find more ways and techniques
to improve and take the EcoBots to the next level.
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