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Robot Eats Flies to Generate Power

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the carnivorous-automotons dept.

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.'"

1 of 410 comments (clear)

  1. Gastrobots by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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:

    Few robotics engineers would disagree that robot development has often been inspired by biological examples (Beer et al., 1997)

    This is not a unique insight but it is funny if you misread it as "biological examples, e.g. Beer".