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. "

Comments

But!

[1010011010]

Will the nanoprobes monitor the water supply for pollution by nanoprobes? Huh? Huh?

How long ..

[SirSlud]

.. 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?

Drink the Robots?

[gilly_gize]

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...

Potential Problems

[mosch]

Is it just me, or does monitoring pollution by dumping large amounts of microscopic robots into the pollution seem really rediculous? What happens if a person consumes these robots? What happens to animals if it turns out that these robots build up in some part of their body?

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.

Great.

[wo1verin3]

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 hopefully

[kraada]

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

Definitions

[medcalf]

Wouldn't "swarms of microscopic robots" constitute "potentially dangerous microorganisms"?

Is this like...

[spatrick_123]

Is this anything like those Sea Monkeys I had as a kid? :-)

Why bother with the Ocean?

[ackthpt]

The worst pollution happens on land, particulary from Ag run-off, and re-irrigation, which draws salts out of soil and makes downstream water unusable. Just look for dead plants or mutated babies and you'll know enough.

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.

Clustering at a very very small size

[Quizme2000]

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.

Where's the Energy?

[klaun]

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?

You Drink Salt Water?

[Quizme2000]

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.

The 'bots aren't real yet.

[foo fighter]

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.

TinyXP == blue color

[garoush]

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.

Old-school nanotech is still the best!

[Graff]

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.