Slashdot Mirror
Swarms Of Tiny Robots To Monitor Water Pollution
savi writes "The University of Southern California School of Engineering has received a research grant to create swarms of microscopic robots to monitor potentially dangerous microorganisms in the ocean. Basically, nanoscale robots with electrical and mechanical components that can propel themselves, send signals, and do basic computations. "
Will the nanoprobes monitor the water supply for pollution by nanoprobes? Huh? Huh?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
.. until we have to send out the second swarm to monitor for the pollution levels the first swarm cause? ;)
Yeah, it might sound like a troll, but it's not! Honestly, how do we know these robots won't affect the ecology of the water they are placed in?
"Old man yells at systemd"
So can you end up drinking the microscopic robots? Couldn't this raise as much protest as floride in the water? (We must protect our precious bodily fluids!)
Oh well, I suppose I don't have enough iron in my diet anyhow...
What happens when the real fish start going after these things?
This is fascinating, but I'd prefer to see these studies being done in tanks, not in the ocean. This smells a lot like somebody solving a problem by creating a different one.
Just great.
I give it two weeks before they get in to all the systems, shut down our life support and start calling us ugly bags of mostly water.
BAH. Where is Wil Wheaton now to save us?
And I thought lead in the water supply was bad enough. Now I have to have my water tested for excessive robot levels.
I've got a water filter. I don't want these little metal bugs swimming around in my intestines.
What's the range going to be on one of those nanobots? I can see how making it microscopic would be great to minimize disruption of ecosystems (although they'll probably get eaten in hoardes anyway), but I could also see how it could be counterproductive if you'd need billyuns and billyuns of them to get any sort of reasonable reading...
this will be the first step towards nanobots inside the human body. If these things can monitor pollutant rate, then they can be easily modified to check for oxygen level in the blood, nutrient level, etc. If they can start moving things around, maybe they can fix internal damage . . .
There's lots of great application for this . . . if it starts by fixing pollution, cool, but I'm going to continue to look ahead to all of the great thigns that this can lead to.
K
This is cool, Im all for minature robotics, like the
one the Brit came up with that feeds and then powers itself on their bodies. They could gather invaluable
information on the oceans, BUT are hey going to put a JONAH circut in these things ?
I mean what happens when a plankton feeder sucks up a hundred thousand or so of these, it will (may) register a higher temp, movement pattern etc.
I love the idea of a self sufficient ocengoing robot, I always have, I saw a solar robot creature
demo a few years ago, neuralnet stuff, that the jellyfish would react to the crab etc, Why no use a larger scale verson, build em in Taiwan at 2 bucks a pop and set em loose, A larger unit could accomplish this, perhaps much more efficently, Miniturization for Minituriztions sake has always eluded me.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Wouldn't "swarms of microscopic robots" constitute "potentially dangerous microorganisms"?
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Is this anything like those Sea Monkeys I had as a kid? :-)
...the big questions won't necessarily be how might these affect the environment as much as they will be, how with these affect the surfing...
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
This is fascinating, but I'd prefer to see these studies being done in tanks, not in the frigging ocean. This seems like it will become yet another one of those examples where the solution to one problem becomes an even bigger problem itself.
...i'm a poor college student. Is there an open-source version of these robots?
From the article:
"I don't think these robots will be confined to the ocean. We will eventually make robots to hunt down pathogens..."
Quoth Agent Smith: "Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are... the cure."
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
get them all to meet at some location and solve RSA problems.
It's okay. Just boil tapwater before you drink it; that will destroy any microscopic robots within.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
What if these nanobots figure out how to incorporate marine life into themselves, create a big hybrid creature controlled by their collective intelligence and try to take over the world???!?!?!?!!
Karma: Bad (but who really cares anyway?)
BTW, read in the Sunday paper that Erin Brockovich is on the trail of another suit against PG&E for Chromium 6 in ground water.
Interested in a history of water use and mis-use? Read Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The robots probably live longer...
Best Slashdot Co
I hope they've got that "don't hurt any humans" thing down, because when they get smart enough to find out where all the pollution is coming from, they're going to come hunt us down.
Each and every one of us.
And bore through our miserable human bodies.
Slowly.
FROM THE INSIDE OUT!
But, other than that, great idea!
Now for those of us that read the Damn article. The ability for the project to suceed on only 1.5 mil is pretty ambitious, the article mentions that they need the software to link together millions of these 'bots via weak radio link, and a mass producing method of creating the other 999,990 units. I would really like to know how they fit a device that transmits a unique indenitifer and a binary digit in an envirment that would seem to distort any type of transmission and amplify electric interfernece.
"Get them before they get....
Holy tiny robots, who are the dopes behind the moderation buttons today? None of the moderated-up comments seem to have come from anyone who's read the article...
The problem I've always seen to nanobots is where does such a small device store energy? In looking at various proposals and ideas on how they would work and what they'd do, it seems energy storage is always the missing component. Propulsion, RF transmission, anything involving actuators are all going to be energy-expensive activities, where does the energy come from?
They might make the robots digestable, so that any organism big enough to eat them will be able to digest them, and possibly use them as a food source. :)
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Maybe this is what've been needing to gain my regularity back. Maybe while they're in there, they can rebuild my arthiritic fingers from programming for so many years. Or better yet, analyze my blood alcohol content, and give me a warning buzz, and an override button. I cant wait, I am going to go eat some drill bits and a wrench, maybe an entire Erector set.
They article mentioned that these would be used in oceans near industrial areas, not your local artisan well or mountain spring. And if you did *drink* them, well then you would *release* them later on, a billionth of an inch is so small you could breath these in a 1,000 at a time and they would get stuck in the mucus membrane in your lungs. Ok..Ok.. You get injected with these things via a crazed scientist in your local mall, your white blood cells, liver, and kidneys would desolve them in you blood stream and release the waste o'natural.
"Get them before they get....
Here in Oregon, we have the Bull run water shed. I've been up to see it as I worked for the City of Portland at one time. The water was so clear you could see the bottom center of the lake, fish and all. Our tubidity (the amount of leaves and crap that you don't want to drink) was less than that of cities using filter systems. Personally I would not like to add anything to my water as it is some of the best in the world.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
The gut of a whale or other plankton-eating creature.
-- yawn. --
Phillips has entered into an agreement with USC to piggy back encrytion software into the nanoprobes. The purpose is that "humans" would serve as node-receivers in wireless networks. The nanaoprobes would then be able to scramble and encrypt data before arriving at its final destination.
...
*sigh*
Wasnt there an article some time about shooting lasers from the moon to create electricity?
repeat after me
"To much Star Trek"
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
So these things generate an electrical charge. What if they are injested or otherwise enter some water dwelling creature? What happens if they wind up in neural tissue? This just sounds like a bad idea.
I wonder that I'll have little robots in my can of tunafish. I'll check the labels carefully to make sure that I only buy robot free tuna.
Wouldn't there be more pratical ways, like putting sensors on commerical boats? You'd have a nice big power source to share from and perhaps even large antennas to transmit your data.
Microscpoic to humans, yes, but not to fish. Will fish eat these things or at least chew them up enough to destroy them?
Fish are unintelligent enough to mistake a hairy peice of silver for a fly, why wouldn't they mistake these robots for some food?
void women (int money, time_t time);
I am sure Slashdot was presented to me with that line four days ago. Today it said in the morning that a Cadre of Random Chickens was in charge, and now a team of Stealth Ninjas, but Friday it was done by microbots. Really.
No, I can't do it.
Jokes aside, that's interesting stuff - but also a little scary. Once you have free-roving nanites monitoring pollutants in the Pacific, how long is it before someone comes up with a way to have them monitor, say, intoxicant levels in your blood?
Just imagine having your workplace demand the ability to monitor what you do with your body 24/7. "Have a few margaritas last Saturday, Wilson? You should really keep an eye on that sort of behavior. You are a company asset, after all..."
OK,
- B
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
If you read the article you will learn that they don't even have a fully functioning prototype yet, and anything they say they are going to do is wild speculation at this point. As are the comments here forcasting ecological disaster or weird effects when ingested.
Also, from the article, they currently are trying to learn how to control 5-10 robots. They are a long way from learning how to control the millions of robots needed for any monitoring to be effective. The researches said that nanotechnology today is at the same stage of development as the Internet was in the late 1960's.
I'd say we are a decade or more from seeing any of these things actually released into the wild.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
....any news story starting with "Swarms of Tiny Robots?"
BREAKING NEWS
It is no secret that those "tiny robots" which monitor the quality of our drining water end up in our body system. However, the big puzzle about why we are seeing so many good citizens coming to a temporarily halt and turning into "blue" color for a short period of time, has been explained.
It turned out that the government has used an Operating System called TinyXP (tm) produced by a company called Microsoft to be the source of the problem. Aperently those robats are "crashing" and emiting "blue" color until they recover.
While Microsoft did not acknowledge the problem, nor did they deniy it. They simply said that they didn't have any comments.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Remember, those denying the existence of nanorobots might actually be nanorobots themselves.
Old Glory robot life insurance, right? The one thing that has always stayed great on Saturday Night Live has been their commercials. Even when the show was at its worst.
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
When I first read this article, I thought Slashdot's "Swarm Bots" took over the articles too..
This Article was generated by a Swarm of Tiny Robots for josh crawley (537561).
I'm not that big on the mechanical nanotech, we have a long way yet to go before we can duplicate some of the most perfect nanotech systems out there: microorganisms.
We have the ability right now to craft custom virii and bacteria which can replicate and destroy other creatures. If we want to kill cryptosporidium and giardia (two common water-bourne parasites) then we should find the natural predators of such creatures and turn them to our needs.
It's similar to the chemical spraying of crops to prevent insects and other pests from destroying harvests. For years we have been laying on the pesticides in order to stop crops from being ruined. Instead of relying on chemicals, we should instead be investing in natural methods of reducing pests, such as the use of preying mantis, ladybugs, egg-laying wasps, and other natural predators.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think that all chemicals are evil and should be eliminated. I'm a chemist myself. I do believe that we can be much more effective if we cut back on the more toxic chemicals and replace them with more gentle alternatives. Many of the harsher chemicals build up and end up destroying the producing potential of our farmlands.
Sapere aude!
/.
The article specified weak radio signals as the method of inter-nodal communication, but propagation of radio frequencies through water that isn't nano-pure really sucks.
Sonar seems more feasible, particularly in salt water where radio doesn't work worth a damn. Of course then you'd have to worry about noise pollution... hey, wait, even if the radio signals work you are going to be really messing with electrically sensitive organisms (electric eels being the obvious example, but they aren't the only ones).
--Charlie
And who's gonna pay my dental bill after biting on those things in a Tuna sandwich???
But yes, the effect needs to be addressed. Although, these aren't self-replicators it should be noted. The density of the bots will be crucial. Assuming they don't build up to a measurable level of "silt", I don't see an immediate problem. Organisms can cope with drinking grains of sand, and these will be comparable to that, or smaller. From what I can gather from the article, they are planning to use inorganic materials for the most part (metals, silicon). If that's the case, I would expect them to be treated much like any other piece of grit. Its the organic compounds that really stick with you.
I like this idea in general, but I'm a little dubious about how well it will work, regardless of side-effects. If you want to use antibodies, you'd better get the binding affinity just right, or you'll end up with a lot of false positives (low affinity) or a bot with all its sensors permanently clogged up (high affinity). Passing through fish digestive systems, getting sucked up by filter-feeders, and generally tossed about in a well-lit, ion-rich solution doesn't do much for long term operation. Are we planning to pump these things into the ocean nonstop?
Still, good luck to them. I'd love to see something like this made to work.
Entropy gets everyone.
Let's just hope they are not running Windows XP.
I would be pissed as all fuck if someone gave birth to a massive turd in my drinking water and a robot couldn't clean it up due to a fatal exception error.
There is nothing more terrifing than drinking water with bits of fecal matter floating around in it.
I think the governmnet should invest tons of money into this program and others like it. I mean, it will be usable technology in only 100 years or so. The scientists are probably at the stage where the robot can figure out how to wipe its own ass. They have a long way to go before that thing can clean up festering bacteria!
There should also be robots in all public bathrooms to clean crap chips off of people after they have an attack of the shits, then when smelly old people that work at my job dump, I don't have to smell it.
I mean really, the application of this technology is endless!
Tiny robots, in the wine,
Make me feel nervous, swimming in my spine,
Tiny robots make my skin crawl all over
With a feeling that our race is running out of time.
So here's to the golden circuitry,
And here's to our silvery seas,
But most of all a toast to USC.
Everyone knows that Cthulu lives deep in the ocean and has already secretly taken over the world.
Does no one else see a potential plot here with these nano machines killing off a large portion of the crap/fish/whatever...but there are a few who adapt and join...and now they are bionic...and they're pissed....
... that allready does this. They're called frogs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now if only I can procure some for the coffee machine at work!
Now if they could only make something to control those dangerous macroorganisms (the two legged kind) that threaten the ocean's health.
Thanks.
available here. The applications of the general techniques they are developing are pretty interesting. Even the further development of SPM's into three dimensional probing is pretty remarkable. Not to mention the greater ends of nanotechniques on manufacture.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The swarms of tiny robots in the water are necessary to monitor the pollution caused by the exhaust of the swarms of tiny robots.
Once this technology is developed it can also be used to monitor for other things. Send a swarm of nanobots into the sewer system looking for traces of illegal substances in waste for example. Just have the little buggers "backtrace" through the sewer network to find your house.
Have a nice day.
What a coincidence -- my slashdot main page was also generated by a swarm of tiny robots (honest!). They sure are versatile.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Anything from University of South Central either is or will be crap. In this case, it'll be whale crap.
If we have a bunch of robots out there in the ocean, why just use them to monitor pollution levels? Why couldn't they also monitor shipping and submarines?
So we spread out a network of nano-robots throughout the oceans, and the US military then knows exactly where every submarine in the world is located. Whether scary privacy invasion or good intelligence, it's probably just about as doable as the stated objective.
Fully 1/3rd of the comments posted on this thread should be moderated down as "Redundant".
And that's just of the +2 level ones I see. I'm sure the percentage is even higher downstairs.
AhH yes but can they monitor their own death? Seems that bunches of robots swimming around and then dying would constitute pollution as well. After they die will they add their own body count?
Waiter, there's a robot in my soup!
Has anyone done an environmental impact study on how well whales will handle these tiny robots. Will they just pass through the whales plankton filters. Will they report a high amount of pollution while passing through the bowels of the whale?
We need to consider stuff like this.
Hrmm, this sounds like something from Star Trek. The day the nannites or nano-bots rebel. It would be funny to drink some of these or to have some of these little bots rebel like cancer in the water killing any life inside of it.
Hrmm, I wonder what they would do to my water-softner?
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
This things will work fine until some miscreant mates them with African swarmbots in order to create more output.
All these little plankton critters...I can see...err...hear it now: "Resistance is futile."
Tiny people, with little guns
Little armies march, to little drums
What do they want?
What do they want?
Tiny soldiers, with little guns
Little tanks, no bigger than your thumb
They want you
Little people, with tiny brains
Little bullets flowing, in their veins
What do they want?
What do they want?
Tiny people with little guns
Little armies march, to little drums
They want you, you
You, you, you, you
Little airplanes, with tiny bombs
Little squadrons, dropping thimbles of Napalm
They want you
What do they want?
What do they want?
Tiny people, with little guns
Little armies march, to little drums
You, you
You, you, you, you
Tiny people, little guns
Tiny people, little guns
Tiny people, little guns
I assume that the effective distance for communication between these things is relatively short. Given the rather large body of water they'll be released into, wouldn't a prohibitively large number of these things be required?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
I love you very much. Thank you for your words of Wisdom. *mwha*
*BWOOP* Vaporware alert. Take cover. *BWOOP*
It looks to me like this research group just got a grant from the NSF, and some reporter got ahold of the proposal and ran with it.
Nobody is talking about making these robots. No way could you ever build such things with a measly $1.5 mil grant spread over three different research groups.
From the press release, it looks like this group uses an atomic force microscope to push small amounts of material around. They build things like tiny wires, have even made a single transistor, and are working on a simple switch. They're light years away from radio-controlled robots, let alone releasing them into the ocean.
This was probably a research grant for basic science, not one to build a fleet of pollution monitoring nanites.
Nanotechnology like the press likes to report is the stuff of science fiction, at least for the next 50 to 100 years.
Talk about something we already know
Its like an antivirus on windows that is telling you every time it found a virus in your machine when you are scanning because it said it detected one ( Nimda virus that infected Favorite come to mind I have 2500 favorites
I would rather have something that help me get back to the beach that are now too poluted to use then have something that tell me Hey , its polluted and here is why !
I personnally dont care about the why I whant a real solution.
Or I whant the job of the guy that as to report to whomever is asking to know if its poluted I would keep the money for the building of additionnal microcospic robot in my bank account and still say its too poluted
Dude, don't bogart that joint.
Perhaps I am missing something here, but from the short description, it sounds as if the concept is to put millions of "free floating" tiny robots into the ocean, where they would communicate amongst each other and thence to the outside world. Each robot would have negligably little computational power, but in combination, the robots could have a great impact.
However, it is easy to see that if the robots are indeed freely floating, and are allowed to drift around for long periods of time, they will become separated. Indeed, given enough time, the equilibrium density of robots reached will simply be the number of robots over the entire oceanic volume! The robots will have become so far removed from their neighbors that they will have become useless. Unless the robots are physically tethered together, it is difficult for me to see how they will remain close to one another for any significant duration. And if they are physically tethered, in esseence to form a larger body, why bother with all of the nanoscale complexity? Why not just monitor using conventional silicon technology attached to floating buoys?
It seems like the grant will be pushing nanoscale technology further, which is great for everyone, but I have serious reservations as to their chosen application. It would seem to me that an application where the probes would be fixed in location (in human tissue, for instance) would be a better application
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I'm not sure on the scales involved, but will the robots be small enough that they might rise up with water that is evaporating? Then they could fall with rain in a field in Kansas somewhere, get picked up by some plants that the farmers there are growing, shipped to the grocery store...
Sounds kind of like the fish thing mentioned in an earlier post, but I'd like to see what they would say to it.
With people already upset about genetic engineering in the food supply, this would probably be too much for them. They might faint while eating a pretzel.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
Sounds a great deal like Roger Meyers Sr.'s movie, "Scratchtasia". I can just see billions of axe-wielding, mouse-shaped nanobots hacking away at each individual cell in our bodies, causing rapid decay into dust.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Makes a great headline, but that's about all
The relative amount of robots to water (in ppm) would have to be incredibly high to even cause concern for pollution levels. Besides, most of the robotic parts will be made of silicon or aluminum, not really a significant toxin, it would be equivalent to ingesting sand and a little rust. IMHO a system like this would be completely cost ineffective. More complicated larger multi-sensory instruments placed at strategic depths and distances from a pollution source would be fine coupled with a robust statistical analysis of the data. As a microbiologist I believe it would be easier to determine what harmful microorganisms are lurking in water sampled from these sites than to have unique specalized robots determining individual species. Hurrah for the technology, but maybe they should rethink the application.
Microscopic robots on duty, pee in the pool at your own risk!
--Management
This kind of unscientific bullshitting by unqualified people just kills me. There are many fundamental flaws in this project. Here's a few
Here's an example of the kind of rigorous though that has gone into this research proposal. Here we have "David Caron, professor of biological sciences and a co-investigator on the project" stating:
Oh is that all it is? And who says that a robot that can do all of that isn't complicated or powerful? And pray, do you know how well radio signals travel in water? Here's a hint, the US Navy subs only use it for extremely short range communication and extremely long range communication (with frequencies in the 10's of Hz range). Oh and did you know that your antenna needs to be proportional to the wavelength you are going to transmit and recieve? Your nano-bots are going to be how big? How are you going to figure out where the signal is coming from? direction finding? GPS?
And pray tell, how are you going to power these microscopic wonders (which need to transmit radio waves mind you)? Remember volume shrinks by the cube.
This is the one that really had me rolling on the floor
Is that all? So, we just need to duplicate the functionality of bateria without the self-duplication but with added radio communication, telemetry (to figure out where signals are coming from), and data acquisition. Oh and social/aggregate organization. Piece o' cake. Is next Tuesday good for you?
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
If you liked Reisner, you should read Norris Huntley Jr.'s The Great Thirst, an amazingly well-researched and thoughtfully written book, and it only really LOOKS like a tome. A more radical, leftist perspective on the issue of water in the American West is Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire; I don't agree with all his conclusions, but he raises several interesting and very fundamental points.
God bless a liberal arts education!
-FB
"Some day I will rule the world. Until then I will rule this plate of peas." -FB
From the article: "A single robot might sense only whether the water is fresh or saline and communicate by a faint radio signal only with other robots closest to it, which would then relay the information to other robots in the network linked to the Internet by still more robots."
;)
So crackers will have yet another challenge! I can see those headlines: "Tiny robots are attacking mankind!"
Where does the GORE-TEX fit in? The sensors for the devices need to be able to monitor water and/or air without being damaged by water, so they're put in waterproof packages with GORE-TEX covering the openings. The water stays out; the vapors to be tested pass through.
Full article can be found at Small Times.
If these robots are to be used for monitoring oceans, i do not see why you need them that small in the first place.
Ocean currents are pretty large scale phenomenas, which are often more vertically variable that horisontally. So making a few (a few thousand anyway) fairly large sized buoys which can sink to a pre-determined depth and surface to transmit data on regualr intervals (which would also allow for re-calibration of position). Such buoys are already in progress and limited use for profiling temperature and salinity. I don't see why they can't be equipped with pollutant sensors instead.
There is still the power problem to solve as the floats in use has a limited lifetime though.
In addition the amount of data that would be generated from vast quantities of nano-bots would still require analysis...less of a problems, but enough to create terrabytes of junk data.
-.sig sauer-
...if that's not a reason to quit drinking sea water, I don't know what is!
Liberty uber alles.
You may call them nanobots, I call them fish bait.