Giant European Robofish Sniff Out Ocean Pollutants Autonomously

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.22.2012 at 2:13 pm 5 Comments

Mega Robofish SHOAL Consortium

A fleet of robotic pollution predators splashed into service today in Spain, in a trial to determine how well robots can hunt down water contamination and report its location to ships or shore.

The rather large and yellow autonomous robotic fish will sample harbor waters, constantly checking for pollution and making it simpler for authorities to track leaks or illicit dumps in real time. They use micro-electrode arrays to sniff various contaminants and can be modified to look for various substances, according to the BBC. Right now they can detect phenols, heavy metals, oxygen levels and water salinity.

The fish are about five feet long, far bigger than the small robofish we’ve seen swimming in labs here in the U.S. Like other robofish, these swim like real fish, using fins for propulsion and changing directions on a dime. A fishlike design is more efficient than a propeller- or thruster-driven autonomous vehicle, according to scientists in the SHOAL Consortium, a public-private partnership in Europe that developed the robots. Props can snag on seaweed or debris, but fins can move through shallow waters with ease, consortium member Ian Dukes told the BBC.

The prototypes cost about £20,000 (about $31,600) apiece, and need to be recharged every eight hours, swimming back to a base when their batteries get too low. They swim independently and can coordinate with each other, working in swarms to track pollution and send data back to a shore-based station a little more than half a mile away. They can even map their own locations, a difficult problem for robots.

The robofish could help reduce the costs associated with harbor pollution, which the BBC says is a little more than $2 billion a year. The fish deployed Tuesday in the northern Spanish port of Gijon.

[via BBC, Reuters]

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5 Comments

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drchuck1

05/22/12 at 3:13 pm

more autonomy, working in swarms, mapping out their environment, recharging when batteries are low, i sure hope we know how to control these when they get smarter than us, cheers

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Artex

05/22/12 at 6:08 pm

Ah... another gadget that's based off biology. So much more efficient than designing your own thing when you can use nature as your template.
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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.

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quasi44

05/23/12 at 7:05 am

These projects should be getting serious funding and should be in heavy production right now, because all the barrels of all the toxins and waste dumped from the 60s and 70s are now rotting through. If we don't start finding and containing these sites, we could, quite realistically, lose our oceans as we know them.

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mansheep22

05/27/12 at 3:54 pm

It's all fun and games until a shark takes a $31,600 bite out of one.

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Nix

11/05/12 at 3:11 pm

Sweet something we put into the water that doesn't pollute it, well until it gets eaten by a bigger fish and sinks to the bottom.

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