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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.
This sounds just like Mr. Fusion! Definitely more effective if you pour the beer out of the can and then toss in the container.
1.21 Gigawatts!?
Soylent Green!
Soylent Green is people! PEOPLE!
Laws are for people with no friends.
Now I can field an army of autonomous spybots to stalk celebrities without having to refuel them.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Now if we can only program it to find Sarah Conner.
At what point do they decide that they want human flesh instead of flies/rotten apples?
Or better yet, at what point do they decide that they want to eat our crops instead of flies/rotten apples?
I, for one, welcome our new mechanical locust overlords.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Make this little robot build copies of itself, from raw materials it collets.
A. the apples i am attempting to eat at my picnic.
B. the flies at my picnic.
C. violation of airspace?
There's a dead tiny-fly-eating-aircraft in my soup!
it's okay...i'm sure the governor of California has a plan...
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
Give robot the ability to manipulate it's offspring's hardware.
Could you imagine flying on it and getting close to no fuel? Suddenly the pilot tells everyone, "we are looking for large patches of flies in the air to maintain the flight course, but we have no fuel left." Then boom, you crash land in an apple farm only to have the plain eat them before you do, even though it is unable to fly?
Damn tricky plains.
> Couldn't a spybot just land on a powerline and get power from induction?
Alas, Hume demonstrated induction isn't reliable.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Does it run Linux?
-Lod
A better wording would be "become autonomous, in other words not need external assistance in refuelling"
... The scientists also mentioned that they had named two of the robots that showed especially good survival characteristics "Architect" and "Oracle."
Said one of the scientiests, "We believe these two will really push the limits of what is possible with carnivorous robotic machines today and will do great things in the future."
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Watch as money gets worthless as tiny robots take over all niches on planet and eventually build a slave race of flies and fruit trees.
Brings a whole new meaning to "Lord of the Flies"...
What's it going to take for this thing to feed on mosquitoes? Live, preferably. And if its possible, where can I get about fifty thousand of these things?
Bloody mosquitoes...
Imagine a beowolf cluster of one of these .. oh wait ... all your flies belong to us .. no uhm, but does it run Linux?
the use of knowledge is highly overrated
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/0 8/221212&tid=216&tid=126&tid=1&tid=14
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
if you really, really must say it, do it right!
... OVERLORDS"
:
"I for one
like Kent Brockman in Deep Space Homer
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality,
I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
The robot could even go out and get a job so it can pay for the gas.
Damn lazy robots!!
More correctly, possibly a future robot or robotic aircraft might one day feed itself with dead flies, according to the article.
An actual working model that's capable of flight looks to be well in the future. However, another(?) group in England is working on a someone similar design that'll eat garden slugs. That seems far more workable...
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
He's on vacation, but he said he'll be back.
"...its ability to power itself by digesting its fuel is a major advance..."
They don't explain how the 'back-end' of the digestion process works. Guess they'll need to create even smaller robots with pooper-scoopers.
> Robot feces?
You obviously don't work in marketing. It's called iPoop®.
So, I can see how an aircraft might get FLIES stuck to it, but Apples? Man, you're flying WAY too low!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
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.
I, for one, welcome our new skynet overlords.
Find coupons in Greeley
This story, and the picture of the rail thin Asian man who is a tsunami victim I asw this morning in the paper reminded me of the lyrics from a RUSH song I heard back in the 80s, paraphrasing, "They feed the machines, not the people"
bio fule cells
p os .htm
http://www.automation.hut.fi/research/bio/sfc00
I would rather be ashes than dust!
"Tiny Aircraft Feeds Itself With Dead Flies" does not exist yet. Read the article, it says they're **thinking** about it. So, it's not a "waste of beer", yet. Just talk.
I always found it strange that Doc Brown pronounced it the same way that Jay-Z would.
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Because there's far more biomatter available than high tensile power wires. I'm looking out the window now, and can see no power lines at all (it's all underground), but I can see a ton of biomass. Also, taking power from power lines would render the whole point of the project redundant - renewable, clean energy? Power from power lines has to be generated, and it's highly likely that power is coming from a highly polluting source.
Ok, so they are working on this in a micro scale, but when the hell are they going to make one the size of a gas tank that can power my car???
I've been reading autobiographies of astronauts and others involved in the US Space program recently. They all talk about the fuel cell developed and used during Gemini and later Apollo. I want to know why, 40 yrs. later, these things are not yet practical? Was there just not enough motivation to make one work in that 40 yrs or was it because until now, gas was relatively cheap and no one cared about the smelly smoke coming from cars?
I say force a greater percentage of cars to be hybrids as a start and get ready to roll out the fuel cells.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Soylent Green???
-Cnik
Venus Flying Trap?
It'll only be useful during the summer in England. A plane that can only fly 3 days a year isn't much of an invention
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So we can power robots with dead flies and apples?
:-)
This reminds me of "The Matrix." Eventually the robots will realize that digesting a human can provide far more power than hundreds of flies!!!
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
...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.