Oil spills are simple to clean up. Only problem is the sheer volume of oil. And an even greater volume of water. It’s the perfect task for a robot! Put several such robots and you’ve got a scalable solution! And robots in large numbers means swarm robotics!
SeaSwarm is one such robot. Each SeaSwarm unit can cooperate using GPS and WiFi to organize themselves efficiently: maximize the area covered by the bots., without human support.
The SeaSwarm robots have a special hydrophobic nanomaterial that can suck oil weighing 20 times the material’s weight. The robot has a solar panel on top and can go for weeks cleaning up the mess. And at the 20x speed, it can really get heavy. So it would have to make repeated trips back to shore. But the MIT people have put in a mechanism to “digest” the oil. I’m not sure what that really means, but they say it reduces the number of times a robot must return.
Seaswarm is just a concept right now. They have built a working prototype, which you can see in the picture above. They should make these robots commercially viable. That way, large corporations can clean up any mess they might create.
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interesting…..