Robot Eats Food and Sewage, Uses The Toilet
Sick of your robot’s batteries running out and want a longer-lived power source? Here’s a unique robotic power source, food.
This robot consume organic matter and produces energy from it with the aid of microbial fuel cells.
Cleverly named ENERGETICALLY AUTONOMOUS TACTICAL ROBOT or EATR for short, (Who comes up with these names?!) this robot is “an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling[...].
The specification claims:
It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable. For example, about 150 lbs of vegetation could provide sufficient energy for 100 miles of driving, depending on circumstances.
Similar to human, it’s eating and digestion process produces waste so it does what humans also do, it goes the bathroom. To be exact, it emits waste in a stream of liquid waste like diarrhea. It may sound disgusting but it is a big step towards autonomous robots which can feed themselves, which has the potential to be pretty revolutionary, or evolutionary if you prefer.
The food it eats isn’t exactly
The idea behind it’s need for going to the bathroom is exactly the same has for humans, to give the toxic byproducts of the digestion and energy producing process a way to exit the system. If it were to contain this toxic waste it would poison the bacteria used in the digestion process. It also keeps its fuel cells from filling up and becoming clogged.
I’m not sure if this robot will ever see the light of day as it is a government/military project. But it may be a solution for waste and oil clean up of our oceans in the future if they can configure the robot to eat these types of “foods”. We can hope it will be used for good as a robot with diarrhea unleashed on the world needs to be closely monitored or the results could be… uh, somewhat messy.
You can read the project overview brief here. It’s in plain English for a change, so it’s pretty easy to read.
Now the robot will just need to be potty trained and we’ll be in great shape!
Image Via Flickr [CC License]
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