Carnivorous robots and digital plasters

Last night I attended the Dana Centre to hear a collection of scientists discuss the blurring boundaries between technology and your body. Contributors from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and University of Reading’s Cybernetics group presented the latest research from their respective departments.

Of the four groups, I was most interested in EcoBot, a project to create an autonomous machine that would take energy from its environment. Unlike solar- and wind-powered devices, which are dependent upon the right environmental conditions, EcoBot would hunt down its own food, advancing robots on from imitating plants to imitating animals. EcoBot-I was designed to hunt slugs, because, in Prof Alan Winfield’s words “Firstly, nobody likes them, and secondly, they’re very slow”. The finished was almost primordial in design, with a long thin neck, large jaws, and a stout body (video). This allowed it to hunt the ground for slug without having to move very often, saving energy. Contained within the tri-jaw was a camera and a red light that would illuminate the slugs (which do not show up on infrared, as they take on the temperature of their environment). Having proved a robot could predate efficiently, the next step was a robot that could digest the captured food.

This is where it gets exciting. The black boxes arranged in a ring are microbial fuel cells - in essence, small stomachs that can digest organic matter and produce electricity. Arranged in series, each generates a few microwatts of power, enough to fuel a simple brain and light-seeking behaviour in EcoBot-II. The best food source for EcoBot-II turned out to be chitin - the principle protein polysaccharide found in the exoseletons of insects. In fact, a single fly in each stomach is enough to power the robot for two weeks! Unfortunately, the waste products of digestion eventually kill the essential bacteria in the fuel cells, rendering them useless.

Currently in the pipeline is EcoBot-III, which uses a trap to catch flies (much like the Pitcher plant). These are digested and the juices flow through the microbial fuel cells and drain out, keeping the levels of toxins at a tolerable level. What it will use the generated power for isn’t yet clear.

Prof Winfield imagined these robots as roaming predators, eating pest species in your garden. My question to him was: why bother when there are already far more efficient biological pest control species in use (e.g. the use of ladybirds to combat greenfly)? Wouldn’t it make more sense to design a robot that filled a gap in the ecosystem, perhaps by designing it to digest oil, plastic, or toxic or radioactive waste? His answer (if I can paraphrase correctly) was that these machines represented an industrialisation of natural processes, just as planting corn in rows improves the efficiency of farming, so too could these robots be more efficient than natural pest control measures. We didn’t have time to discuss it much further, but I really want to know the answer to this next question: if we can create robots that are autonomous and biologically embedded in the ecosystem, what are the implications of releasing these hybrids “into the wild”? The introduction of non-native species can play havok on an ecosystem - could EcoBot be the next grey squirrel or Japanese knotweed?

Further reading - you can visit Professor Winfield’s eloquent blog on all things robotic here!

Part II - digital plasters - will be uploaded soonish. Are tiny sensors that monitor healing and transmit vital stats a good thing? Or is it another step in making private information available to anyone with a scanner?

9 comments January 23rd, 2008