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MIT Unveils Oil-Skimming Robot Swarm Prototype

Posted by timothy on from the so-burning-harmless-eh dept.

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."

4 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah! by somersault · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Burning oil is well known for being harmless!

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    which is totally what she said
    1. Re:Yeah! by FooAtWFU · · Score: 1, Insightful

      What, is this a global-warming remark? All that oil was destined for burning anyway. It's doing a hell of a lot less harm being burnt than it is choking off marine life.

      But nuance is dead in the climate-change "debate"; go figure.

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  2. Who's gonna pay? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I don't see BP investing in alternative ways to clean their own mess up. We'll see what they do with these robots.

  3. Re:OK, so it sops up some oil. Then what? by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The math doesn't work. 16'x7' is 112 square feet. 33 barrels of oil (which is how much would have to be removed each day by a fleet of 5,000 skimmers) covers that to half a meter thick, and weights 4 tons. You won't be going very fast towing that with a 1/8 hp (100 watt) motor.

    So, skip the self-propelled aspect, just attach floaters to the absorbent, toss them in the sea, pick them up, pass them through a wringer to squeeze out the oil instead of heating it, rea-attach the floaters and toss them back in.