U.S. Will Use Robots to Patrol Water Supply

bl8n8r writes "By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply. Realtime environmental details will be used to help safeguard the nations drinking water. The robots would take on the painstaking, time consuming, and sometimes dangerous, task of collecting water samples which is currently being done by carbon based lifeforms."

Comments

Not quite...

[KevinKnSC]

By the summer of 2005, the United States will have an underwater network of robots monitoring the nations fresh water supply.

The article only mentions a project to monitor the Seneca River, some connected lakes, and an existing system that monitors part of the water supply for New York City. That's not quite "the nation's fresh water supply," although it is certainly a promising technology.

Re:Bender

[mark-t]

You've been modded as funny, but you raise an interesting point.

In general, people are more distrustful of a computer or machine to do a job that a person could be or was doing. A machine would be subjected to _FAR_ more rigorous tests than a person would ever be before it would be entrusted to perform the same task(s) as a person might. Once such trust has been obtained, however, invariably a bunch of "carbon based lifeforms" glumfully head for their nearest unemployment office.

The cost of progress... I wonder if it's worth it.

Misleading Commentary

[hndrcks]

"... task of collecting water samples..."

We have been using 'robots' to collect water samples for many years - I believe the article states that the new breed of robots will directly sense the water quality, with no sampling required. A small but important semantic difference.

Weather stations did this

[hpulley]

Recently in Canada a good number of weather stations went from human operated to just a set of instruments and a network connection. It does save money but you occasionally get wonky readings like a "Recent snowshower" in July which a human would never report. Perhaps better programming could be used to ensure that multiple readings are used to filter out extraneous data but there will always be a need for at least a few carbon-based testers to go out there and install them, maintain them and check them when they act up. Similar issues will likely appear with robotic water testing.

Re:This is awesome

[shawb]

Yes, zebra mussels do CLEAR the water, but they do not CLEAN it. What they do is they remove all the sediment that other creatures oftem feed on, thus making it unavailable. However, they pass most pollutants right on (except for some heavy metals and such which they bioaccumulate like crazy, poisoning any creatures which then eat them.)

And the clearing of the water actually causes problems in and of itself. There is still a super high nutrient load in the water, and the extra light allowed in causes several noxious weeds to grow out of control, choking out most normal vegetation, destroying habitat several animals use (especially for egg laying) and choke waterways from human navigation.

While their unchecked growth in the wild does cause problens, zebra mussels could make an interesting part of a constructed bioremediation system (at least in waterways which are already infected by the zebras anyways.)

A couple of links on zebra mussels:
Wisconsin DNR
Minnesota Sea Grant
Missouri Department of Conservation
Iowa DNR

And slightly more technical link outlinking some ofthe risks of overfiltration

Re:This is awesome

[Aardpig]

Far from being the panacea which you describe, Zebra Mussels are an ecological disaster, which have led to the killing off of many native north-American bivavles. Go back to square one, do not pass go, do not collect $200.