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MIT unveils swimming, oil-cleaning robots
By: cnn.comPosted On: 08/26/2010 4:56 P
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Here's a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.
Here's a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.
Instead, just deploy an army of autonomous, oil-scrubbing robots. They can find the oil on their own. And when they reach the site of an oil spill, they talk to their robot friends to figure out the best way to get the whole thing mopped up.
That's the vision the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward on Wednesday as the school announced the development of a prototypical robot called Seaswarm. The $20,000 robots will be unveiled officially to the public on Saturday at an event in Venice, Italy, and will be ready to deal with oil spills in about a year, said Assaf Biderman, who oversaw MIT's research team on the project.
The Seaswarm robots look like a treadmill conveyor belt that's been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that's engineered to attract oil and repel water.
"You can imagine it like a carpet rolling on the surface of the water," said Biderman, who also is associate director of MIT's Senseable City Lab.
The material on the robot's conveyer belt, which MIT calls a "paper towel for oil spills," can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil.
Once it has absorbed the crude from the surface of the ocean, the robot can either burn off the oil on the spot, using a heater on the "ice cooler" part of its body, or it can bag the oil and leave it on the surface of the water for a later pick-up, Biderman said. That oil could be reused or recycled.
The robots are designed to work in a swarm, he said, meaning thousands could be deployed on the same spill at once. They coordinate with each other by using GPS location data. That lets them plot out the most efficient way to tackle a clean-up project.
Biderman said the Seaswarm robots are relatively cheap, quick and effective at cleaning up oil spills.
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