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MIT Unveils Oil-Skimming Robot Swarm Prototype
destinyland writes "Today MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil 'like paper towels soak up water,' absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly 'digesting' the oil by burning it off. Powered by 21.5 square feet of solar panels, the 'Seaswarm' robots run on the power of a lightbulb, and with just 100 watts 'could potentially clean continuously for weeks' without human intervention, MIT announced. The swarm uses GPS data and communicates wirelessly to move as a coordinated group to 'corral, absorb and process' oil spills, and MIT researchers estimate that a fleet of 5,000 could clean up a gulf-sized spill within one month."
Burning oil is well known for being harmless!
which is totally what she said
So what about a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest a swarm of smaller autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill
sure, maybe, if you exclude all the sub-surface oil. And there's a lot of subsurface oil.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I don't see BP investing in alternative ways to clean their own mess up. We'll see what they do with these robots.
I'm confused to how/where those small robots will burn off the collected oil. And I'm wondering whether, if they burn it off in/at the robot, whether the generated heat can't be used as an extra power source.
Isn't that a lot of oil to burn? If we don't actually mind burning oil you could power the robots with some/all of the oil they collect instead of using solar power.
Next thing you need is an electronic sensor that can smell and taste oil in the air and water. Then working as a swarm they can find oil spills, move to them autonomously and consume them.
A couple days after they are released, I'll finally have my Tricycletops.
Looks like an engineered subliminal message. Is it? If so, fuck you scum.
OK, each unit sops up some oil, using "nanowires". Then what? The oil then has to be transferred to some collection boat. That part isn't implemented.
A fleet of semi-autonomous skimmers that deliver oil to a collection ship or a shore station would be useful. Operations like that are risky for small boats, as are operations near shore, near rocks and reefs, and such. So it's a good robot application.
The "nanowires" just sound like the usual hype from MIT's PR operation (which has gotten out of hand enough to be an embarrassment for MIT.)
Sounds like an advertisement for the next generation of vaporware projects. So what's its carbon footprint?
Well, if nothing else the Gulf spill has bought out the inventors/crazies. Since BP's Deep Horizon oil rig accident and subsequent spill, everybody and their redneck brother in law has come out of the woodwork with the silver bullet fix. Every bizarre and off the wall idea has been proposed as THE solution. From human hair to straw mats, from tankers turn skimmers to mutant man made microbes. Now, even MIT wants in on the madness.
The irony of it all seems to be that after all the berating of BP's efforts, it seems that good old chemical dispersants, combined with natural factors like evaporation, microbial consumption, and wave action, has already turned the largest oil spill in U.S. history into a thing of the past. There is no need for oil skimming robot swarms.
5000000 barrels and 5000 robots, that gives 1000 barrels for each robot and month??
so in one day one single robot will take up approx 30 barrels: that is more than one barrel per hour
day and night?
Seems to me as some MIT miscalculation or am I missing something?
SeaWow holds twenty times its weight in liquid, doesn't drip, doesn't make a mess, you burn it off. Made by MIT, you know MIT makes good stuff. Okay, here's some oil stains. Not only is that damage going to be on top, there's your plumes underneath, that's gonna get into your sand, see that. Now we're gonna do this in real time, look at this, it goes on a spill, I don't even have to control it, it just does the work. You following me, camera guy? It acts like a vacuum. SeaWow -- you'll be saying WOW every time. And if you call right now, cause you know we can't do this all day, you get 4999 more SeaWows, that'll clear up a spill in a month. Here's how to order!
Check it:
http://www.amazon.com/Watermind-M-M-Buckner/dp/076532024X
to Kevin Costner's machines? Anyone hear of any success of those?
I wonder how this will work under real conditions with 6 to 8 ft seas and wind churning up the gulf.
Let's see... they're tiny robots, they consume raw materials...
Mark my words - pretty soon some bright lab jockey will come up with the idea of giving them the ability to build more of themselves using those raw materials. And we all know what'll happen next.
#DeleteChrome
You migh want to check out the consequences of the oil spill and the use of dispersants before making such comments!
From a scientist a the scene: The oil spill's toxic trade-off
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Ready the electromagnets!
It seems this thing (and the video) is pure fantasy: It does not show anywhere how in practice the oil is going to be removed and how much oil each robot can carry. In my view, that leaves an absolute critical component out and makes this whole thing a publicity stunt and nothing more. Especially its power consumption is a pure lie, as the stated ratings are never going to be enough to remove the oil from the mat. Think of a swarm of these things and a large tender with huge energy needs that they have to go back to every few hours. Then it becomes more realistic, but not anywhere near as pretty...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Collecting and burning oil but using...solar for power? Seems odd. Maybe a mech eng can explain.
It's the Nanowow! Holds 20 times its weight in oil! Doesn't drip! Doesn't make a mess!
Why solar power when it can generate plenty of power while burning it?
oh, wait... I have an oil powered solar collector. It seats seven and even has cup holders. It uses collected solar radiation to warm the seats and the beverages in the cup holders, but that feature only works during the day time.
IF those movies were about the inevitability of machines turning on us, that joke might have been funny!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
As shown, there's no provision for navigation lights.
I believe under the maritime Rules of the Road [PDF], one of these would be classified as a ``vessel not under command'', in which case it should display two red lights, one above the other, at night, and two black balls ditto during the day. (Rule 27 (a)) I don't know whether these are large enough to require such displays, but hit one of them in a sailboat at good speed, and you could be in real trouble.
Additionally, a radar reflector would be a Very Good Thing. Unfortunately, that might be impractical due to wind resistance.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I don't think the designers appreciate the difficulties what they are proposing.
First they suggest someone could/should have thousands of these autonomous vehicles sitting around (in an operational state) waiting for oil spills (with no auxiliary purpose).
Second they ignore the sheer chaos that would ensue as thousands of small, low-profile vehicles travel in and around other vessels necessary to actually stop/control an oil spill. These things wont show up on radar. They probably can't be seen at night, and are likely difficult or impossible to avoid by the large ships that get called to such oil spill areas. So either you have to drastically rework ship traffic to avoid the robots, maintain exclusion areas around the robots, or banish the robots to areas away from essential ship traffic.
Third, operating autonomous vehicles at sea is very difficult. Doing so on these scales is not only difficult, it's absolutely unheard of. Nigh impossible. Keeping small numbers of autonomous vehicles operational, launching them, and successfully recovering them is no easy task. The only way you can really hope to deploy autonomous vehicles in these numbers is if they are disposable and you have no intention of recovering them.
Finally, what happens when a storm or, God forbid, a hurricane decides to stroll by? Are you supposed to send out crews to wrangle up the 5000 vehicles bobbing around the increasingly rough seas? Do you leave them to their fate/demise?
This whole idea wreaks of idealistic nonsense and poor engineering.
Remember that any technology looks best a) when in development, and b) to its originators. Take any and all numbers and promises and scale them back from 50 to 80%.
Random thought: Put one in the water upside down---can it right itself? Because it's guaranteed that in heavy seas they'll be flipped over every so often.
On the other hand, given that the waves could flip it back up, as well, on average you'd have 50% of them rightside up at any time. It might be easier to double the number of gizmos than to design them to be self-righting.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
A superfluous invention. Why not just rely on Alcanivorax to clean up the mess? It's already there, it replicates itself in direct proportion to the amount of oil, it self-destructs when there's no oil left to clean up, is 100% bio-degradable and it costs nothing, doing the job in half the time.
I for one welcome our swarm of autonomous floating overlords
I'm no scientist, but it seems like humans should have developed a way to capture and store energy created by burning fossil fuels by now. It's so disappointing to hear we haven't figured it out yet.
Can MIT come up with something else than "solar powered nano technology autonomous robot swarms". Is this the "Build a really cool solution, and then spend a decade looking for the problem it solves"
Would be nice to see some innovation there. Are they not supposed to have the skills and intelligence to think outside the box and go in new directions?
- a NON-autonomous robot
- a FOSSIL powered something
- some new MACRO technology.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Not if the spill comes from an oil tanker. Also they didn't mention which gulf they have in mind.
3%? I guess it's the best that MIT could do, given their comprehension of the problem to solve. And people still wonder why I think the Cardinal Red 'S' looks pretty good.
Indeed, and with the case at hand in the Gulf, thanks to those dispersants, quite of bit of the oil is now a sort of emulsified goo. It has a specific gravity just about equal to that of the ambient seawater (so it hangs in suspension) and even if it could somehow be made to surface, it won't burn. AFAIK, there are no credible plans to get rid of that stuff. I'd imagine that it prolly clogs up fish gills quite well, too.
Why not power the bots using the oil they collect instead if just burning it?
The interesting aspect in the MIT approach is that they approach the problem with a set of relatively small devices. Due to the wavy water, the oil patches become smaller and distributed. With the relatively small MIT robots they can scent out oil patces the same size. Other approaches involve large machines which become ineffective for small patches.