Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 55.
A robot running on microbial fuel cells (Courtesy of Stuart Wilkinson
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crobial fuel cells (MFCs). The sugar was broken down inside an MFC's
“stomach” by bacteria, resulting firstly in chemical energy being produced
by the digestion process and then in that chemical energy being con-
verted into electrical energy.
Wilkinson's gastrobots had to be manually fed with sugar cubes, which
prompted a team at the University of the West of England, led by another
gastrobot researcher, Chris Melhuish, to consider using live food that the
robot itself could capture. The UWE team's first effort in this direction
was called a slugbot, because they had decided to use slugs, a major pest
on farms, as the robot's source of food. It was intended that the robots
would employ a vision system to hunt slugs, then grab the pests and de-
liver them to an on-board digester that produced methane to power a
fuel cell.
In the laboratory, and under conditions similar to those found in real
agricultural fields, the prototype slugbots could move, detect slugs and
almost collect them, ignoring stones in the process.
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But the methane-
based system took too long to produce power, so Melhuish's team gave up
on slugs and turned to sugar. Their next prototype, called EcoBot I, was
the first robot in the world to acquire all of its onboard power fromMFCs
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No animals were harmed during these experiments at the University of the West of England.
Although real slugs took part in the testing of the vision system, the slugs picked up by the robots
were plastic.
