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A Robot That Runs On A Sugar High
Digitalia writes: "Using a biological soup that mimics our stomachs, the gastrobot is the first commercial robot that "feeds" on organic matter to get its energy. Chew Chew, as it is called, takes a cube of sugar and turns it into enough energy to roll around for 15 minutes. I particularly enjoyed the creator's explanation as to why his bots aren't carnivores. Check the article out here." 15 minutes seems a pretty good run for a sugar-cube, but hasn't anyone explained the carbohydrates theory to this robot?
There is a much shorter article in the December 2000 issue of Popular Science.
...and I'm not sure we should trust this Kyle Sagan either.
In that article it mentions that the creator has plans to build another robot that would be able to search out it's own food source.
Is there a way it could eat things it could find in a land fill?
If it runs for fifteen minutes on a cube of sugar, just think of how long it could run on a single Hostes Twinkee...
Oops... I just got an overflow error on my TI-89.
Yah, I've encountered some of those... They're called programmers.
--hongpong.com
I saw this in a magazine over six months ago. Quite an old story.
All the bot can do is roll around until its battery runs out, then you feed it more sugar. It sits there for a few hours charging on the sugar, then rolls some more.
All in all, not really much in the way of a threat, but a pretty neat idea. As for flesh-eating robots bent on human destruction taking over the earth one day, I seriously doubt it. That would require some pretty good intelligence, and I just don't know if we would ever come that close.
-
The IHA Forums
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The really interesting aspect of this experiment is that the guy managed to generate electrical power from simple bacteria.
Imagine a machine with a miniaturized, balanced eco-system on board, where the production of algae or some other easily grown form of life provided enery to bacteria or some other life form, which in turn provided waste products that fostered algae growth.
They would be low powered machines (akin, I would think, to sloths), but given the exponential growth of new technology these days, I bet somebody could come up with a fairly efficient machine.
Eat all you want, have it get rid of a percentage of the sugars for you.
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I wonder on the energy efficiency of a system like this. I see that the original reporter in the story was not taking this too seriously, even though this does have some potential. Some details provided are interesting
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The lemon battery consumes its zinc electrode. You need lemons and metal.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
"Those idiots should have made it run on caffeine and sugar..."
"Beer has lots of sugar... I think that the robot should be converted to beer power!"
-Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
Well, whatever you are going to grow to produce the energy, plants, algae, etc requires the sun. So your suggestion is good, except we've already cut out the middleman (algae, etc) and by just using solar panels.
:)
No moving parts, quiet, and you don't have to water them.
I wonder what "monitoring" needs to take place in an orange grove that a fixed sensor couldn't handle?
Lots. I live near USF, and we are "blessed" with lots of groves. They need soil testing, disease/pest watching, stupid trespasser watching, sucker removal (no, not the trespassers, the little shoots), fertilizing, pesticide spraying, roundup spraying, etc. If the beastie could take over any part of this, it wuld be wonderful. But, personally, I think he'd get more juice out of photovoltaics. Hope his efficiency improves.
1Alpha7
Live to be Moderated
Yes, I can confirm it.
I made a car that could do this, and parked it in my garage. It was stolen. So were all my design documents. My computer was picked clean of all the relevant information, and written with random data. I woke up one morning to find a hole just behind my ear, and I had completely forgot about the car, the plans, how it all worked. All I found were what they'd put in it's place. Copies of playboy magazine around my floor, gigabytes of porn on my harddrive, and a memory of a really good party.
Those bastards will still be driving around in my car without having paid a cent for fuel. I was going to be rich!
http://www.angryflower.com/alight.gif
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
Mr. Fusion :) Just need to get a robot to run on Free Beer. :)
...that can be locally grown?
:)
For small-scale applications, the one sugarcube in 15 minutes thing doesn't sound that bad, but if this finds wider use someday, I hope they will check into other forms of plant matter.
Then again, driving up the price of sugar might not be a bad thing...keep the kidlets from buying so much candy and the megacorps from putting so much sugar in everything.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Many cars can run on alcohol (ethanol) without modification to the engine. Alcohol can be made from sugar, so there, a clean fuel.
Ants love wet sugar! Imagine robotic ants? :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ok, it works a bit better if you imagine the professor from Futurama saying that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Thalia
Sometimes differentiating between reality and fantasy takes all my energy.
to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson.
I blame the schools.
M0571y H@rml355.
Cars already run from organic molecules, Oil is just plant matter that's been rotting for hundreds of thousands of years.
Our machines are not the only things producing greenhouse gasses. Animals breath in O2, and breathe it out as CO2, a greenhouse gas. It would be an interesting excercise to measure the greenhouse gasses produced by a 300 horsepower car and compare those to the gasses produced by 300 running horses. It would be interesting to see which generates more greenhouse gasses.
I'm not sure an animal-type metabolic system for energy would be any more efficient than the existing internal-comustion engine. Take our previous example, and compare how much fuel (five gallons, or around 30 pounds) it takes for our 300 horsepower car to go ~100 miles. Compare that to how much food/water you'd need for your team of 300 horses.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Nothing new here. Slashdot ran a story a while back about a slug hunting robot that is powered by digesting the slugs it catches.
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"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This is a wonderful first step. The limiting factor is the fact that the conversion from releasing electrons to charging a battery is a) slow and b) inefficient. What the robot is doing is essentially interupting the formation of ATP in a biological cell, and taking the electrons that would be used to charge a battery. In the near future, I would imagine that the battery can be dispensed with, and instead the "stomach" itself could be used as the battery. The concept would work something like this:
a) when cells digest carbohydrates, they eventually transport electrons outside of the cell membrane. This can be extended to transport them outside a larger, non-ionic membrane. This creates a charge difference.
b) A circuit could be constructed with the + end outside the cell, the - end inside, and voila, a working circuit which runs directly from the electron transport chain.
A bit heavy in Biology/Chemistry, but there you go (I'm a chemist at heart)
hmmmm?
the gastrobots have been built without the ability to defecate
Does that mean they're full of sh*t?
Maybe we should send them to Uranus?
Bye bye, Karma!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
By the way, where does it say "one cube of sugar lasts for 15 minutes" in the article? All it says is that it uses cube sugar for fuel, and "Chew Chew's sugar high lasts only 15 minutes at best"... It sounds to be more than only one cube.
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
Well, with less and less consumming electronic components (ARM, Transmeta,etc.) it could be a cool idea to have sugar powered-laptops or embedded devices.
It would be quite useful in areas where powering (either electrical or solar) and access to the devices would be difficult.
--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
ahh... ...no.
a) a 300 hp car might do 20mpg, but a smaller engine would do more
b) distance means nothing without comparing load or weight moved. Your 300 hp car is moving 1 person (most likely in North America these days) or about 300 lbs (most likely in North America these days) By contrast, you do not need anywhere near 300 horses to move 300 lbs 100 miles - more like 1.
obOff-Topic: I just had the most horrible experience - as I finished the last sentence, I realized that MS Word grammar check would have flagged it, which disturbs me on 2 levels:
1) that I have spent enough time working around MS Word "features" that I recognize MS Grammar (New-Speak) on sight
2) the horrifying vision of the slashdot lameness filter paired with MS Grammar check.
... "It looks like you're posting a troll - would you like some help?"
... "Passive voice - try bashing Microsoft"
... etc...
Maybe we can train these SOBs to eat plastic or trash or something?
300 horses will produce a considerable amount of gases including CO2;, ammonia and methane.
One horse, as a previous poster commented, *will* move 300 pounds 100 miles but very very slowly. It would take a couple of days, as the horse would only sustain a gallop for a short time, the rider would withstand a brisk trot for about the same amount of time (your legs get tired, or your backside gets sore) and at a walking pace would cover 100 miles in around 30 hours.
If you want to use a petrol engine, you get less harmful emissions (up to a point) from larger, low-compression ones. At higher compression ratios (above, say, 9.5:1) the mixture burns hotter in the cylinder, and produces more nitrogen compounds, but you do get more power for a given capacity.
I've tried it. If you use a non-catalyst equipped car, and a gas analyser (assume both engines have been tuned correctly), a 1-litre, 50hp engine produces more NOx than a 2.3-litre, 100hp engine. (1986 Nissan Micra K10 compared against 1982 Volvo 240).
Newer, 16-valve, cat-equipped engines are worse.
Editor: So far?
Stuart: (evil grin) It can't catch meat... so far...
Editor: D-do you mind if I cut that part? You promised me you were going to stop saying that!
Stuart: (wringing hands) Yeeeeeeessss... cut that part... my robots will cut that part... MWA HA HA HA HA!!!!
This article has a glaring inaccuracy, stating that the engineeer was at University of Southern Florida, and not Univerversity of South Florida as is the case. I'm looking at the picture saying "That looks alot like the concrete bench I outside the ENA building I took a header off while rollerblading" when I noticed that the picture did say South Florida accross the side. Geez, my alma matter never gets any credit.
BryTech: What on Earth was that, Edgar?
Edgar: Sugar.
Tech: I've never seen Sugar do that.
Edgar: Give me........Sugar.
The tech hands the Robot a bag of Domino Sugar.
Edgar: In Cubes.
The tech opens a drawer, and gives Edgar a cube of sugar.
Edgar: More.
The tech tilts the bag, giving the robot several cubes of sugar.
Edgar: More.
The tech tilts the bag farther, feeding a few more sugar cubes into the robot.
Edgar: Nnggggttttthhhhh.
The tech pours the entire contents of the sugar cube bag into the robot. The robot exits the office, probably off to capture the galaxy.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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Hey! That's not a sugar cube, it's people. Oh my God, it's people. Gastrobot runs on people! It's peeeeeepollllllllll!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If this robot could be modified to feed on cat feces, urine and furballs, I could kill 2 birds with one stone: clean up the mess they make, and save myself a lot of nasty work. Of course if it fed on cats, my problems would be gone forever.
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
acknowledges that more oomph can be extracted from animal flesh than plant matter
Can some biology student please explain if this is true? I dont know if I agree - wouldnt the highest energy content in food be found in something other than animal flesh? That material may not be Sugar but could it be something like peanut butter (nuts of some kind) or something else?
I understood, one of the major arguments of vegetarians is reducing ones ecological footprint. Meaning that not eating animal flesh means that you require less area to grow enough food to sustain yourself. Ie. It takes 100 acres to grow 5 cows wich can feed 10 people for one year vs 100 acres to grow XXX bushels of corn with can feed 100 people for on year. This would seem to violate this idea by saying that you can achieve greater concentrations of 'energy' in animal flesh -- then the anology above would not be true.
Can someone please explain...?
Feed it salsa, and then see if it produces methane and endures a gas leak! It would be the first robot to fart! Now there's a true leap for science!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer