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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 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.
> 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
Why does celebrities need refueling?
A better wording would be "become autonomous, in other words not need external assistance in refuelling"
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Uh, look it up in a dictionary: he pronounced it right! Most people do not realize that the prefix "giga" in the English language should be pronounced "ji'ga" not "gi'ga" - at least, that is how it was until the prefix became popular with computer terms such as gigabyte and gigahertz. Now, both pronunciations are generally accepted. Wait... could that be Linguistic Darwinism???? ;)
William George
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.