Tiny Aircraft Feeds Itself With Dead Flies 270
An anonymous reader writes "The research team from southwest England have built a robot which can move and transmit sensor data over a radio link powered solely by unrefined food including dead flies and apples.
The robot, known as Ecobot II, uses a Microbial Fuel Cell as its only power source. By "digesting" its own fuel, the aircraft could become autonomous and operate without the need for refueling, changing batteries or recharging from the mains. In the Microbial Fuel Cell microbes are used to extract electricity directly from food - in this case flies or apple." Several people noted this previous article on the same project.
Re:Great Scott! (Score:3, Informative)
Repeat? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I for one welcome... (Score:2, Informative)
"I for one
like Kent Brockman in Deep Space Homer [snpp.com]
And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality,
I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Wrong tense! (Score:5, Informative)
More correctly, possibly a future robot or robotic aircraft might one day feed itself with dead flies, according to the article.
An actual working model that's capable of flight looks to be well in the future. However, another(?) group in England is working on a someone similar design that'll eat garden slugs [wired.com]. That seems far more workable...
great article on the prospects and efficiency of.. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.automation.hut.fi/research/bio/sfc00
"Tiny Aircraft Feeds Itself..." does not exist (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Jigga-Watts (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wrong tense! (Score:2, Informative)
The EcoBot worked fine. It used a microbial fuel cell powered by suger solution to drive a very light robot base towards a light source. Simple, but a perfectly good tech demonstration.
UWE also has experience with very low-mass autonomous blimp robots. Heavier-than-air flight is a different ballgame, so it looks like they've teamed with aero engineers at Bath to look into this.
UWE has probably the most interesting robotics group in the UK.
(I'm a robotics researcher, not affiliated with UWE.)