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Robot Eats Flies to Generate Power
ms47 writes "Interesting little story over at MSNBC today about 'robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations.' The neat part is it's powered by 'catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells.'"
The answer is flowers!
.shit and rotting meat.
Indeed. That may, in fact, be the very inspiration for this device, as flowers that attract flies and digest them smell like. .
Go figure.
KFG
Robots that have biotic stomachs are sometimes called 'Gastrobots'. There is a paper from MIT on the subject. Another paper from some guy at USF has this choice quote:
This is not a unique insight but it is funny if you misread it as "biological examples, e.g. Beer".
Mosquitos are attracted by CO2 which this thing probably puts out. Still, flies are much juicer than mosquitos, unless the mosquito got to you first.
Actually, i believe mosquitos are attracted to carbon dioxide.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Here you go: link. Even has a photo.
-Lucas
Your general flowers will attract wasps, bees and butterflys, when you want to attract the less wholesome type of fly you need there favorite food, so that's shit and rotting carcas smell :)
They're attracted to a variety of things, not just carbon dioxide. Certain pheromones and the chemicals we secrete in our sweat attract them just as well if not better than breathing. The reason certain body sprays can work (to an extent) is because they clog pores rather badly. Scientists are still trying to figure out what exactly attracts mosquitos so they can figure out a way to repel them properly.
This all is also why you tend to get bit more if you're being active outdoors, because you're not only sweating more, you're breathing more too.
Maybe when they get farther in figuring out what exactly attracts mosquitos the most they can make a robot that eats mosquitos as well as flies. Until then, I'm perfectly content with there being a few less flies buzzing around (hey, it's not like it's difficult for them to reproduce, just slap a rotting carcass on the ground somewhere).
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
This is being developed at my university (uwe) although we didn't get a mention in the article! :-( Anyway, yeh, they've been working on it for a while. Not sure about 7 but at least around 5 years ago. The original was a slugbot. An article in the guardian in 2000 makes reference to it: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 101493,00.html
Or you could go straight to the lab ;-)
http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/
And for the guy complaining that solar is better. They do solar too :-)
Yes, look at the lab website. http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/
Is this a joke? Robots wouldn't eat humans for the same reason nothing else does. It's inefficient. A robot could easily obtain more energy from the first trophic level such as grains or other plants. We are what, second level consumers? Sometimes even third? Everything that wants energy on the food chain follows the same rules. Robot or animal.
What signature defines me as a person?
Here is a PDF File from the project owners, including photo.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Why smell? A uv lamp cand atract insects (like the UV insect killers) and for long periods Electricity is easier to generate than smell.
Well, the symbolism should be obvious, and it was a lot better than the old tradition of giving them animal sex organs. If you think roses don't look very good in a vase after a week...
Just in case you don't think the poster is serious: he's dead serious.
Won't somebody think of the children^W butterflies^W raccoons?!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.