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SlugBot, the Slug-Powered Slug-Hunting Robot
Adam Foster writes "SlugBot is no ordinary robot. SlugBot hunts down slugs, and is powered by fermenting the slugs' corpses, producing biogas fuel. Find out more from the BBC."
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I suggest mating the Slugbot with the Flybot
--
(assuming that noone for a while will be able to feed on the SlubBots)
Interesting idea... The robot is probably not tasty, but perhaps creatures that don't mind eating dead slugs will learn to raid the slugbot hopper? Could be dangerous if they hide in the hopper and don't escape before the return to base, though.
Anyway, the slugs have the most to gain through adaptation here. If the thing is efficient, perhaps slugs in the area will learn to "hide" from it by standing in an unusual posture, or near a bright light or something. Or, since the thing uses a red filter to help identification, gaining any kind of red pigmentation would be very useful.
Any adaptation that successfully defeats the machine for a year would be highly advantageous, since the gardens would be filled with nice, juicy wheat, and no competition from other slugs.
Well, actually it's the original meaning of the old phrase.
Err..this is off-topic, I know, but if you've got termites, your house was bad even before they came. Termites feed on rotting wood and rotting wood is not good(dammit...that rhymes!). At least they use it rather than let it go to waste.
H.G. Wells did that a century ago, minus the Swastika, of course.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
So that's what you've been doing in the wheat field.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
The Luser-Powered Luser-Hunting Robot.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
er ... "Beoslug"
Of course, there were a few problems in the past, such as always having to shake out my shoes before I go to work in the morning; being able to track them; and preventing them from uncontrolled reproducing. Controlling breeding is accomplished by keeping only one male in a tank - all the hunters in home are female(you learn to identify the gender pretty quick). Every now and then, you pop a female in the tank and see if they'll go at it (it looks more like a fight than mating). Tracking is still a problem though. I used to glue keychains to their backs, the kind that beep when you whistle, but well, um, those things fall off after the scorpion molts. I'm thinking of switching to a transmitter to relay to position of each scorpion, so when my database tells me it's time for one of them to molt, I can just find her and keep her in a tank until she's done - the transmitter can then be reglued and she can be released back into my kitchen. The database is already set up; it uses the MSDE, which is simply the engine behind MS-SQL Server. If you want to see the front end (written in VB) I'll be happy to send it to you, but I don't yet have routines to account for input from a receiver - but my current plans call for using two or more to accurately gauge the position of any specific scorpion. Source code available on request.
While on the topic of a Roachbot, you should check out this story, where a Japanese company attached electrodes to a roach's brain and take full control of its motor functions. I can just see the implications: you release your robo-roaches armed with extra electronics and assembly instructions into a new slum and within minutes, they have taken new "converts". [Insert evil smirk here]
Skevin
MCSE/MCDBA (Slashdot is also read by us Evil Empire people too)
malusdei@pacbell.net
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
What if someone made a robot that could feed on larger things? Mice? Cats? HUMANS?
Such a robot would require an advanced neural network for its intelligence. I wonder if a cluster of slug brains would work.
Now THAT would rock!
Well, so far slugs are fermented in a station,
but what if bots could do this themselves? And
what if they have a positive feedback that makes
them treating slugs as _food_? Ie, the more slugs
a bot picks, the more powerful it is....
On the other hand, slugs can evolute, can't they?
And change their behaviour to fool the bot, eg
learn to crawl faster or to change the form of
the body to look like something else....
I'm not sure about practical usefullness, but by all means it's very interesting to set a series of experiments.
KuroiNeko
BTW, there's a superstition that human hair is :)
to be burned, because if it's not and if a bird
makes a nest of it, hair's `ex-owner' will feel
a huge headache while the bird is in the nest.
However, nothing is said about the beard
KuroiNeko
What we have here is actually pretty radical. This is more or less a fully autonomous, self-powered robot that could continue to do it's job (albeit a very simple one) indefinitely. It can't repair itself, but otherwise will keep going until you stop it. Not to mention that it has the ability to identify targets in an area with plenty of interference (plants and other critters).
This could be a harbinger of significantly more useful stuff to come. Slus are slow, and easy targets, but what about other pests? Another possibility is search and recovery missions. Imagine robots with similar logic looking for, say, the debris from the EgyptAir crash the other day.
Now, a scary thought - Imagine your AIBO hunting slugs. Brrr.....
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
flying slugs?
As a final desperate attempt the Bots have sent back one of their Terminators to the year 1999 to slay that brave Slugs father/mother, one ordinary garden slug living in a suburb of .....
Cut to a parking place. Suddenly the air starts to shimmer and in a blue light a frightening machine appears (built from Lego Mindstorms (TM))
Giant slugs are a possibility, but they will still need to live on the run while teenagers. I think a leaner, meaner slug would be a better adaptation. An area could support many more slugs of small size, making Slugbot work harder for less food. Also, the natural bias in the slug detection routine will strongly favor finding large slugs. It may be worthwhile to bias slugbot to go after smaller slugs first, to avoid pushing selection in a direction helpful to the slugs. This may avoid the problems encountered by the farmers who used larger potatoes for food and smaller ones for seed.
Maby they should also come with a sign that says:
STEAL ME
This is the first predator robot of the world. Where did the robot laws not to harm anyone go?
The End is near.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
well, slugs are nice and slow and easy pickings for a small 'bot - make something that'll patrol my kitchen and snap up La Cocka Roachas all night and I'll be impressed - that would take some sensor-actuator coordination :))
The digester is a neat idea, but since it has to 'return to base' to ferment the biomass is it really more effecient that just tapping into the mains to recharge? Then there's the post-ferment waste to deal with - fertilizer?
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The Slugbots don't reproduce, so that's not really true.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Well, I'm not sure about the Europe and slugs,
but definately, the European part of the former
SU, especially in the South (Ukraine, Moldova),
every summer is screwed with Colorado bugs,
little pests, of sand colour with black stripes
along the body and orange heads that eat potato
leaves like hell.
The only sure way to get rid of such a bug is to
burn it because even if it's smashed, eggs it
carries develop within days....
KuroiNeko
...for the Slashdot Linux Users Group!
You mean off of the planet? Ouch.
Saltman versus the slugbots #1 ; great comic. The slugbots never had a chance.
Seriously, though. A robot that draws its power from the decomposing bodies of its victims. How cool is that?
It's not baloney. They're going to use decomposing human bodies, not slugs. We have lots of untapped power in our bodies.
The plan is to combine the robots with the software detection program that screens out potentially-dangerous students. All the people who have violent tendencies will be taken on a "special" field trip out to the wheat fields. Then it's a free-for-all with the SlugBots and their surgical-blade equipped mechanical hands.
Personally, I see this as a good use of otherwise wasted resources, plus society avoids all the potential harm of these mal-developed individuals.
First RoboFly and now SlugBot.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Ugh. If they are going to be this lazy, the least they can do is put out a call for name suggestions. I'm sure slashdotters could think up something better.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Whatever next, you ask?
Why, adapting these robots to ferment cane toads, of course! Just make them bigger, with a stronger gripping claw so the beasties don't escape, and we have a potent weapon to fight these environmental pests.
If all the cane toads in Queensland got fermented, the roads in Queensland will be safer. All the cars will stay on the correct side of the road, instead of veering across the centre line at random to run over cane toads. (The generally accepted correct technique of running over cane toads is to run over the heads first, so the air inside the cane toad escapes with a pleasing pop.)
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
They should just equip the end of it with a salt shaker. That'll take care of the slugs. Double it as a margarita maker and I'm sold.
Mike
Like Grandpa always said, "It's mine, I can wash it as long as I want to."
MG
Does this reasoning apply to fishing? I don't fish, but I thought most fishing laws made you throw back the small ones.
Is this another one of those inventions that will lead to greater innovations in the field of robotics and miniaturization?
I guess this is much preffered to pesticide. How many of these SlugBots(tm) to you need for a huge field?
--
rJames.org - illustration
Are you sure that they are slugs? There are a lot of other slimy things in that area...
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Has anyone seen the movie "Screamers" ? Sure, that's how it always starts, with simple things... :-)
Actually, 1,500 was the cost of the prototype. They went on to say that a mass-produced version would cost a lot less.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I remember reading in one of Asimov's robot short stories about a small robot that was built like a bird and that was designed to hunt down fruit flies. This robot sounds similar to that :)
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
What I'd like to see is something useful in my area (Texas). We need something to take care of our little fire ant problem. Maybe a robo-anteater or a miniature bug-like critter that could run around invading ant mounds and assassinating the queen ants. The fire ant problem has spread from Texas to halfway up California and everywhere in between in the west. It's gone all the way to Florida and as far north as South Carolina (IIRC) in the east. There are some patches where they haven't gotten to yet, but it's not looking good.
I'd love to see a robo-critter created to help fight these nasty imported bugs. At least those bullet ants haven't made it here yet. If they ever do, I think I'll be moving farther north.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I know what I want for christmas now :) Of course, there's always the problem of finding enough slugs for my sadistic appetite.
Here in the land of Oz we have a problem with Cain Toad that were introduced to eat the Cain beatle, but didn't. Now they are a big pest and have adapted well and breed like rabbits. Now if we could build a robot like this we could aviod introducing another speices to control the cain toad, and when they are all gone we can just turn turn them off or get them to target other introduced speicies. The only problem would be getting the robot only to target Cain Toads and not our native frogs and toads. I can really see a use for this and would like to see some more research on devices like this. Craig.
...if the SlugBot's control logic was an artificial neural network made from slug neurons.
Actually this robot seems as though it may be the first to qualify as a real new animal as it converts what it hunts into energy - now all you have to do is get them to reproduce :-)
Personally though, I think it would be cheaper to build a birdbox in your back garden in order to encourage a slug eating avian robot to nest near to a good local food supply.
Of course, a Slugbot has no natural predators, yet.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
First, it means a new linux port.
Secondly, it means thousands of linuxheads will anxiously be checking John Romero's .plan to find out when the new slugQ3test will be released.
Third, it means a new O'Reilly book. But what will be on the cover? A slug or a salt shaker?
Four: General Media will recognize value of slugbot, then say it is overhyped. Doc Martens launches a FUD campaign. Sadly, nobody seems to understand slugbot, except for readers of slashslug.org, and they inevitably come into conflict with readers of rival site slugdot.org.
Five: the subject for the first /. action movie:
They were ordinary slug-hunting robots. He was a mild-mannered garden hamster. But when they killed his partner, they made him mad. This Christmas, are you the slugbot? Or are you the slugbotbot? 'Hemos Thunder'."
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
I was intrigued by the thought of carnivorous slugs, so I did some searching around the Net. I found that the Testacella slug lives underground and hunts earthworms and slugs
a .htm
http://www.hanslope.demon.co.uk/mknhs/testacell
Unfortunately almost every type of animal finds the brown slugs inedible due to their (supposedly) foul taste. Result: the slug population is rampant in urban backyards. People are resorting to methods such as the aforementioned beer, or pouring salt / cutting in half individual slugs. This is really considered a large problem, with sometimes up to a thousand slugs in just a single backyard!
There is one animal that will eat the slugs : an obscure type of duck. Enterprising farmers are renting these ducks to people on a daily basis. It will be interesting to see what the introduction of slugbots will do to this market.
I seem to recall that there's a slug (quite a small one) that behaves in a rather Exocet-tastic manner - following the slime trail of the victim slug at high (for a slug) speed until it reaches its prey.
A robot clone of this might be a good project for the nanotech bods.
Steff
And in light of all the similaritys being drawn with The Matrix, I only have one thing to say. "Salt. Lots of salt"
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Don't waste the beer on slugs!!! :)
Buy one of these machines, and rent it to your neighbours in exchange for the beer they would have used catching slugs in their own backyards!
Isn't this part of the OSS creed - free beer from technology!
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
It eats like a duck. It walks like a duck. Does it quack like a duck?
And the slug-loving-duck delivery service -- Truck-A-Duck!
PanDuh!
Been there, done that, free T-shirt with the purchase of a bag of horse's blood.
man, if this thing met slugman, there'd be some horrendous consequences....
of course slugman has only fought paige-o-tron so far (as we have seen) but a new enemy could be introduced...
"lunboks"
- calvin
ian
Not enough to power a robot of that size. Nice idea, but I guess they havent tried to implement it yet.
"The future masters of technology must be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the
> And there should be no
> shortage of prey. Up to 200 slugs per square > metre are found in fields of winter wheat.
doesn't that seem a bit much? Can you even walk without squashing a slug?
Now if they just made a PoliticianBot, we'd all be in business.
--------------------------
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
Sure, the slugbot can catch slugs, it can see them, it can catch them, but can it get to them? Does it have a GPS to help get over a rock? Isn't this the same problem we had with the Mars Pathfinder mission. Just wait till these things start get caught on dandelions. But what if these we're made bigger and were designed for humans? Scary thought. Well, it would be nice to talk about while Hemos, Rob and I are sitting in a collection chamber slowly decomposing into gas. --Never do it. Unless its tomorrow.--
I wonder if the exhaust smeels like slug farts.
"The future masters of technology must be light-hearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the
finance shminance... Rather a field patrolled by expensive self-fuelling robots than one sprayed with cheap ToxiChemMeadowBlight. Might not even work out too expensive (all depends on maintenance costs and availability).
Good God: even only 5 slugs/min, for only 6 hrs/day, for only 250 days/yr = 450,000 slugs/yr.
Where on EARTH did you learn so much stuff about slugs? Rent-A-Duck. I like it.
Um, people?
Imagine you're driving along a road in a country town, through a wheat field, and there's NOBODY around for MILES - and you see this little square aluminium box on wheels, with a big arm moving slowly along the edge of the wheat field - wouldn't you be even SLIGHTLY inclined to stop, and since there's no-one around, pinch the thing?
I know most people wouldn't actually do so, but I don't think it wouldn't got through anyone's mind - but some people would take them, and I'm not sure that I know of a farmer who could afford to lose a $1,500 tool that easily, especially not several of them.....
somehow this reminds me of watching the movie "The Matrix"
;)
I thought the exact same thing! Imagine if the SlugBots get artificial intelligence! I can see it now. Little cocoons with slugs inside, and hooked up to a machine so that the slugs are in an imaginary world, believing that they are eating real leaves. And the agents will be supper powered snails. Until one day the slug "Noa" gets in contact with the slug "Trinity" and wakes up to find the truth behind the SlugMatrix. The slugs overcome the AI and come back to the real world just to be eaten by birds.
Just a thought!
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
There are lots of doomsday scenarios where human civilization gets wiped out by artificially intelligent robots. Here we are building a robot whose sole purpose is to hunt down and kill another life form. All things start small, we might one day find that the robots we are building will turn against us. I think the people building this robot should seriously consider the ethical issues that is poses.
Want a better nightmare..
Make the thing severel times bigger....give it claws to hold its prey while it struggles. Place a large syringe on it to take a blood sample. Do genetic testing on the sample. Sample does not meet genetic standards, throw them in fuel tank. Now put a large swastika on the beast and you get the idea.
This is scary and reminds me of conversations that took place during the early days of nanotechnology, on 'control' factors. The scenario was creating buildings out of polution using nanomachines; however, a get loop occurs, the earth shifts off axis, and life, for this cycle, ends. oops! Apply this to concept to the snail killer, add a faulty program that interperts humans as snails, and a color detection filter and .... Besides, (imo) snails are frosty and have great sex... even if it is a little slimey. ;-)
hehe.. it is going to be Field Tested :)
I'm glad Tom Selleck is still around to hunt these things down when they go haywire. I sure hope he brings along his babe of a partner.
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
>Interesting idea... The robot is probably not
>tasty, but perhaps creatures that don't mind
>eating dead slugs will learn to raid the slugbot
>hopper?
Yes, why eat a tin can, when you can munch on a nice, tasty, juicy, slugbot?
:)
We'll feed the cats to the rats
And the rats to the cats
And get the cat skins for nothing!
A buddy of mine is named "Noa" and I keep confusing his name instead of the name for the character in "The Matrix".
Steven Rostedt
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
...who built the ark and took aboard 2 of every variety of slug to save them from the great irrigation that wiped out all life in the field.
BTW, I'm not interested in getting into another religious debate on slashdot so don't flame me.
Mike
As Grandpa always said, "It's mine, I can wash it as long as I want to."
MG
True, Screamers didn't recycle their targets into fuel but they were fission powered I believe.
Slugs are peeps too!! oh wait...
...scary, how about combat slugs...designed to jump the robot, chew on elecrical wires, using their body to short circuit him (kamikaze slugs)...higher intelligence so you would have a slug-designed robot-slug
Today SONY released the newest device in the competitive portable MP3 player market, a slug bio-mass powered device called Slug3. Sony expects their device to be a hit, because users will never need batteries - they simply pluck slugs, crickets, snails, mice, roaches and other garden pests off the ground and place them in the cold fusion chamber of the player.
Whatever next?
... tender and juicy on the inside.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Get armour (snail)
This is amazing (if a little disgusting in the details), and I really do mean that. But just think how this technology could be applied to other fields.
We could have vending machines that really do use slugs.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Actually, a farmer won't put salt on his field because that poisons the dirt and eventually nothing would grow. On the bright side, there won't be any slugs in that desert either.
Maybe they should equip them with GPS tracking systems... wait, they already have!
All it takes is the addition of a 50-quid GSM modem and hey presto, it 'phones home when it's been nicked- complete with the longitude, lattitude and elevation of the theif's abode.
You could even set parameters so that you could tell the robot the layout of the field, or maybe your entire farm- and if it breaks down, 'phone home with it's exact location.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Lord what we who fear & have fought with termites would give for a bugbot that ate the little homewreckers!
nahh.... too scary :-)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
I can't believe I don't see this in the posts yet, but isn't this the same idea as the Star Trek (original - and BEST) episode about the planet killer machine, powering itself on the digested remains of the planets it destroys?
It's a great solution. Unfortunately my dog LOVES beer, so the glass would always be empty :)
Matt.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
we're already spread all over the earth, so it ain't so long a trip for anyone to check out the situation in their own backyard.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
whats next....??? How about the Politician_Bot that fuels its self by sucking the life force (that is lies and greed) from dirty politicains and producing Processed Cheese (in a can of course) for us! Maybe even some snack crackers. Now THAT is aboundant resource!!
I am an American and may have missed something - is there a massive slug problem in Europe? I know that the US has a few slug hot-spots (Oregon, etc) but I was not aware that Europe had any issues with the little beasties.
--
I live in the ocean
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
Now what's needed is a recipe for beer made from slugs which also attracts slugs...and you thought the slug fermentation was only to generate gas.
It's got an arm, vision and a tankful of slug goo. Seems well capable of fighting back if stolen. Also, as has been said, it knows where it is. I imagine the robot phoning the police to say "I have been stolen and am at XX Long / YY Lat", then when the police arrive they find a traumatised thief yelling "Just get this thing off me!" as he battles with a comically enraged gunk-spewing robot.
Later on the News: "And finally, a thief got more than he bargained for when he tried to steal a new pest-control device..."
Sheep brains became... Cattle food.
Sewage became... Cattle food.
Slug residue became... now let me think.
10 slugs/minute
200 slugs/m^2
twenty minutes per sqare meter. How long (or how many at 1500Q) for a single acre?
ever watched a hungry duck or goose go after slugs? How many ducks can you buy for 1.5KQ? They fertilize and provide meat for the pot as well. No pesticides necessary.
Depending on how you want to define a robot, there are quite a few hunter-killer systems that might classify. For example, the Swedish Strix mortar shell is a "fire+forget" antitank weapon- launch it and it will find a tank and kill it. Tacit Rainbow was a similar US project to develop an anti-radar missile: fire it at a target area and it would circle around until it found a target- it worked but was cancelled due to budget problems. No human intervention in either, both are self-powered and self-targeting, so they seem to meet most definitions of robots.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
My mother went to the liquor store and asked for a large bottle of cheap beer. "You mean, our inexpensive beers," the faintly-offended store clerk asked her.
"No, cheap beer," my mother said. "It's for the slugs.
My mother described his expression as "indescribable."
I immediately sent the link to my mother, who has
for long times trapped slugs with glasses of beer embedded in the ground. Unfortunately these traps attracted loads of slugs from neighbours. Of course, for 1,5kQ you can buy quite a couple of crates of beer instead.
What about the financial aspect of it £1,500 thats about $2494 USD at a maximum 10 slugs a minute?
- ---
P.S.
Yes it's the revenge of the Britts... I get persecution from people everyday bitching at me about spelling things like "humour" and "Colour" and they all start the subject with Damn Britts..
---------------------------------------
Movie News - "Entertainment news, bitch!"
Let's give this some thought: A robot that feeds and recharges itself from it.
Very quickly we can make the connection that this is a possibility for a very frightening future.. or a really bad B-rated sci-fi flick.
--
rJames.org - illustration
I'm way impressed! I'm reading through the article and thinking "yeah.. neat. Some bods have got themselves a cute research project. Ho-hum" Then I got to the part about 200 slugs per square meter. Damn! All of a sudden it dawns on me this is a 'real' thing. :)
I dunno but doens't that just thrill you? People thinking way outside the box and acutally getting some where with it? Okay, they're not there yet. But can you imagine a field with 3 or 4 of these things in it? Set and forget pest control. Hhehe... although I do kinda have visions of war of the worlds in miniture and slow motion.
... with eskimo chains i tatto my brain all the way...
If you deploy something like this on a large scale, you are adding an evolutionary pressure to the slug's environment. Speculating idly on how the slug's genome may respond:
Lower their metabolic rate so they show up less well on IR, or change shape so they don't look like slugs to the robot (stealth slugs).
Become too large for the thing to pick up (yuck)
Develop a mechanism so their exothermic decomposition becomes *much* faster. Exploding slugs (ultra-yuck)
There is at least one species of slug (huge brownish ones - too lazy to look up classification) that feeds primarily on other slugs. It would be interesting to do a trial to see if these could be used effectively for slug control. I'm not doing it though. Watching one slug eat another is easily the grossest thing I have ever seen.
"Sluglent green is slu-u-u-u-u-ugs!"
Ahem. Damn glad I got that out of my system. Sorry, sorry, so so sorry.
Now we wait for the introduction of AI. I think I'll have to reinvent myself as martial artist.
or possibly as sidekick of keanu Reeves.
Aaahh, there are green letters scrolling down my screen!!!
The idea is really cool though, I can see a lot of possibilities here, Biogas driven lawnmowers, dust driven vacuum cleaners....
I'd equip my car with a few brushes and it'd run on the stuff other people throw out of their window (and I'd have a turbo boost during fall!)
Decollate snails are a predatory snail used by farmers in some parts of the US to fight snail populations. The problem is that the recommended 'dosage' is 500 snails per acre per year. I'm not sure about their current cost but I imagine a Roboslug would become pretty cost effective. Plus the Decollate's only eat the young snails (smaller than .5 in). The theory behind it is that after several generations of baby snails getting gobbled they'll eventually die out.
Have you ever seen the movie the Matrix? Isnt that how that got started? with robots like that, which fed off of living organsims?
My dog did, too. One night in high school I had a hard time explaining to Mom why the dog was tripping over everything in the yard and singing.
--
This is not my sandwich.
According to register.com, slugbot.com, org, and net are still available. Enjoy.
this has something to do with Osmosis
Yes it does.. (summoning the power of high school chemistry class..)
Water moves from areas of high concentration to low concentration. Pouring salt (or salt water) over the slug lowers the water concentration outside of the slug, so the slug loses its water to its surroundings, much to its dismay..
If you wanted to try the opposite (I have no idea what would happen), try plopping one in some distilled water. It should get bigger, as the water moves from the high concentration outside the slug, to the low concentration inside.
Kinda makes you shudder, though.
Ok, in a pure acedemic sense, it's a great project and embodies lots of good technologies. Espically the idea of 'eating it's prey' by turning the bodies into fuel for the next run. But, bigger picuture thinking now, is the slug population so out of control as to warrant these miniture terminators actually being used? You all will think I'm nuts, but I happen to like slugs and I think that using a machine to hunt them down and eat them is inhumane and unjustified.
Last time those people came up with something this disturbing, it involved feeding sheep brains to cows.
Something feels wrong here. Very cool, but wrong. And after the whole mad cow thing, I'm inclined to pay attention to the feeling.
On second thought, this isn't nearly as disturbing as the sheep brains, but let's think about the concept of tanks of fermenting slugs for a while.
Now there's a visual: Mr. Clueless Felon swipes one of these puppies, opens it up...
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
http://www.angryflower.com/alight.gif
vonSlugman device, I suppose :)
Slashdot, meet Slugbot, Slugbot, Slashdot, Slashbot, Slugdot... Slashbot the Slugbot!
;)
Slashdot also fuels itself using it's victims
...end of transmission...
This is all baloney. There is no way they will finish the "self-sustaining" part. How would you draw power from the decomposing remains of a slug? You could never get enough energy to drive a robot of that size.
The slugbot should be able to make more slugbots as long as it has a wealth of prey. In times of prey shortages, some slugbots should power down and die... or find other prey. Like those little mexican rat dogs... or poodles...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That optical recognition software better be pretty damn good. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night with a robot grabbing Mr. Happy.
-lx
Rig them like the messenger bots in Marge Piercy's He She and It. Lots of strong encryption, but besides that, they violently explode when tampered with.
Of course, there might be reprocussions when the farmer's dog tries to eat one of these things....
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If they ever made a powered snotbot.
This is truly Unique..
A slug terminator! And the thing comes with a GPS and costs less than one! ha, this is one gadget to have.
On slug temrinations, I've found that if you mix some salt in water and pour over them, a really weird thing happesn to their bodies (ahem. they dissolve.. this has something to do with Osmosis.. very neat experiment).. Try it.. but be ready to watch solid ooze into slime real quick..
Slug Feast!
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I read in an organic gardening book someplace that human hair will kill slugs. The theory is that if you spread hair on the ground where slugs are known to exist, as the slugs crawl over the hair, the hair wraps around the slug's body and eventually strangles it. We don't have very many slugs around my house for me to experiment to see if this is true and if so, what length/thickness of hair works best. Alan Cox's wife Telsa has complained about slug problems in her diary and I've forwarded the suggestion to her. Given it doesn't appear that Alan's been sheared yet, she probably hasn't tried either.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Hey, you could change the visual recognition to search for politicians - that would be _really_ useful. Wouldn't even have to change the name...
That guy in Jurassic Park was right...these guys ought to really stop and wonder not whether or not they could make these robots..but whether or not they should. This is not good. What if someone made a robot that could feed on larger things? Mice? Cats? HUMANS? If they can do it with slugs, to say they can't do it with larger creatures in the future is the same as watching the Wright Brothers take off and saying we could never reach the Moon. And it wouldn't be the nice guys that made such a monster...it would be the terrorists and war mongers.
A robot that feeds on living things.... you idiots!!! Note to the lab coat guys: Blow up the factory and burn the plans. And ban any further research. Now. Before you find out the hard way that what I'm saying is very, very relevant.
I'm pretty sure there will be no trouble manuevering around rocks as the average winter wheat field has zero. Thus leading one to the assumption that a few must have negative numbers of rocks to balance out those few with positive numbers of rocks. This assumption is actually true.
Sorry. Wheat fields tend to be relatively flat with clods of dirt being the exception. Based on the picture and the fact that the box is 45cm square (assuption - this is 45cm X 45cm, not 45cm^2 as the arm would appear 3x longer in the picture) the wheels have a diameter of about 20cm which could travel nicely over the average winter wheat field.
So thus ends the McNeily Nightly Agra-Business Report. G'Night
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Do ya job. That was bloody funny, up his score a little, ay mateys??
Research assistant needed for creating more aggressive algorithms for the SlugBot.
Requirements:
(PrezRelease)
.. affactionaly called BFG31337. Quake for Slugbot is also modular and users could make their own modules to compliment all that which was included in QFS.
IDOT softarware, annoucned today that they have ported their higly acclaimed game to the Slugbot hardware. This port was done with the help of the Linux kernel and AC's including AC. Quake for Slugbot features among other things (to help censors) gore levels, ability to switch weapons to salt sprinker and the mega salt water spourt
In other news, Microsoft decided to enter the Slugbot OS market and would unveil a new OS entitled Slugggin-dos. With the slogan, "The only Microsoft Product that Lives up to it's name".
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Hum, I guess this will mean farmers also gotta buy huge electric-hazard fences to put along their property. :-)
It would be highly profitable and easy for theives just to steel such devices found on the fields.
I wonder what's next.... robotic dogs feeding emselfs with theives?
When I was at UWE (University of the West of England) over in the now Intelligent Computer Systems Centre, we did a module on robotics. Two of the guys from the engineering faculty came in to talk to us. We thought the slugbot was a bit way out and found it suprising someone had actually come up with the cash for research. As for the wheels limiting it, this may be true, but at the same time we were told of another project in which they wanted a robot to traverse complex 3D environments. Say for example branches in a tree. It was gonna be based around a preying mantiss. They apparently have small sets of neurons at the base of the limbs to control their legs. The same would be emulated in this new robot. This sounded very ambitious. But you never know. They did after all actually do the slugbot. Though they never mentioned to us about using slugs for fuel. Wonder which poor 1st year gets to clean it out heh. Brad