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Tiny Aircraft Feeds Itself With Dead Flies
An anonymous reader writes "The research team from southwest England have built a robot which can move and transmit sensor data over a radio link powered solely by unrefined food including dead flies and apples.
The robot, known as Ecobot II, uses a Microbial Fuel Cell as its only power source. By "digesting" its own fuel, the aircraft could become autonomous and operate without the need for refueling, changing batteries or recharging from the mains. In the Microbial Fuel Cell microbes are used to extract electricity directly from food - in this case flies or apple." Several people noted this previous article on the same project.
Make this little robot build copies of itself, from raw materials it collets.
Give robot the ability to manipulate it's offspring's hardware.
A better wording would be "become autonomous, in other words not need external assistance in refuelling"
It seems that for an electrical device it might be easier use to electromagnetic energy without the need to convert chemical energy from biomass. I remember someone at the university talking about having a small robot just land near a power line and recharge its batteries using induction. Or I imagine in an urban environment there might be other powerful sources of EM energy. But obviously in a remote location, flies and apples would work better.
Any engineers who know more about this?
The fact that we can turn food and other organic material in electricty is what excites me, more then the robot itself.
Could we use this to process our junk, or a good chunk of it in to electricty.
A compost pile that can power power your house, if only just as a small supplement would be cool.
...mosquitos are annoying, disease-ridden....
:-) Oh, wait -- female mosquitos are necessary for producing more male mosquitos, right? Guess what -- male mosquitos eat, among other things, nectar, and they don't suck blood. I don't know, but here's a guess -- maybe there's some pollination going on during feeding?
So are flies (except for the parasite part). Anyone want to suggest we get rid of all the flies and then deal with the resulting buildup of dead carcasses due to lack of maggots?
Heck, I don't know if female mosquitos perform any useful function besides being bat food & bird food -- maybe they don't. But I *like* bats & birds.
I just learned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito) that there's even a species of mosquito that feeds on *other mosquitos' larvae*, and doesn't suck blood. What happens to the harmful mosquito population when we wipe those out, 'cause our stupid little robots don't know the difference?
My problem is with statements like "...consequenses would certainly be local....". How do we know that? What's Dr. Malcom's line in Jurassic Park? Something like "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Or maybe "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me."
They need to make it eat misquitos and just fly around, maybe do something else useful like act as a wifi link in a larger network and reduce the pest population at the same time.