Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
utilising refined fuels (sugar). Its successor, EcoBot II, which weighs a lit-
tle more than two pounds and moves about one inch every five minutes,
is also powered by MFCs, but these contain bacteria originating from
sewage sludge and fed with dead flies.
An MFC has an anode (a positive electrode) and a cathode (a negative
electrode) just like a battery. In the EcoBot II's MFC, the bacteria at the
anode act as a catalyst to generate energy from the flies. At the MFC's
cathode, oxygen from the air acts as an oxidising agent, producing water
which closes the circuit and keeps the system balanced. EcoBot II needs
to be manually fed with dead bluebottles, but the ultimate aim of the
UWE robotics team is to develop a predatory robot, using sewage as a
bait to attract the flies and then a bottleneck-style flytrap to suck the flies
into the digestion chambers. It will not need to catch a huge number of
flies to generate sufficient electricity—in laboratory tests EcoBot II was
abletomovearoundforfivedaysonjusteightfatflies.
Domestic Robots
The idea of domestic robots is not a dream hatched after the start of the
computer era—it can be traced back at least as far as early nineteenth-
century Japan, where the clock maker and inventor Igashichi Iizuka built
a mechanical doll that he could send to the local sake shop. The doll
left home holding a flask, made its own way to the sake shop, waited
until its flask had been filled (triggering a part of the mechanism that
was operated by weight) and then returned home to its inventor.
Having a robot servant might be described as every home-maker's
dream, so it is hardly surprising that, in the era of the robot, domestic
help is high on the agenda of many product designers and manufacturers.
Although the arrival of generally useful robotic domestic servants still
appears to be a decade or two away, already there are affordable robots
for performing certain specialized tasks.
Robot Vacuum Cleaners
The first domestic robots to sell in high volume were vacuum cleaners,
with two manufacturers cleaning up most of the market. In the U.S.A.
the iRobot Corporation had sold more than 500,000 of its Roomba
TM
model by October 2004, a product invented by iRobot's founder, Rod-
ney Brooks, and two of his former graduate students at MIT, Colin Angle
