bots IN BRIEF
DON’T DRINK THE WATER
Water has long been the dumping grounds for just about anything and everything that humans have ever wanted to get rid of
semi-permanently, and it’s starting to show. WatCleaner is a concept
robot that’s designed to float around rivers, lakes, and oceans cleaning the
water as it goes. It can deal with both bulk garbage (by slurping it down
and disintegrating it) and suspended pollution like oil (by absorbing it into
collection bladders). Supposedly, it’s even smart enough not to ingest and
disintegrate narwhals or dolphins (or whatever).
The bot is fairly small — half a meter long — implying that a lot of
them will be needed to have any meaningful impact, especially if they
need to be emptied and refueled. The concept doesn’t really deal with
the operational logistics (most concepts don’t), but at the very least,
it’s a worthy endeavor.
MOTH HEAD BOT
Okay, so insect brains are way more complicated and capable than even the most complex artificial robot. With this in mind (so to
speak), researchers in Japan are attempting to experimentally determine
how insect brains are wired, in the hope of (soon) altering insect brains
to do other things and (eventually) creating electronic brains that mimic
the functionality of insect brains. They’ve already been able to genetically modify a male silkmoth so that it reacts
to changing lights instead of changing scents; in effect, remapping one stimulus-response to an entirely different
type of sensory input.
The robot pictured here is controlled by a severed moth head. The still functional antennae receive scent
information and relay it to the moth’s brain which does the data processing and sends signals to muscles, which
are picked up by sensors and used to steer the robot. In this particular case, the robot can’t do much more than
chase down sexy girl moths, but with the remapping technique, all kinds of customized moth brain sensor robots
are possible. But, there’s more!
Experiments have shown that moth brains — like human brains — have the ability to adapt to situations
which might seem impossibly complex from an evolutionary standpoint.
“Humans walk only at some five kilometers per hour but can drive a car that travels at 100 kilometers
per hour. It’s amazing that we can accelerate, brake, and avoid obstacles in what originally seem like impossible
conditions,” commented researcher Ryohei Kanzaki.
“Our brain turns the car into an extension of our body,” he said, adding that “an insect brain may be able to
drive a car like we can. I think they have the potential. “It isn’t interesting to make a robo-worm that crawls as
slowly as the real one. We want to design a machine which is far more powerful than the living body.”
Cool tidbits and interesting info herein mainly provided by Evan Ackerman at www.botjunkie.com, but also www.robotsnob.com
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