Fly-eating robot powers itself

[GAspnes]

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/12/27/explorers.ecobot/index.html

...it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.

Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.

Melhuish, who is director of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab at the UWE, told CNN that the EcoBot II was a result of a quest for an intelligent robot that could function without human supervision.

"That means they need energy. It is one thing to have a robot getting its energy from a household socket, or maybe from the factory floor, but it is another thing when the robot goes outside buildings," he said.

"Of course, there is solar energy outside. Little robots can use solar energy to move about. But mostly, if there is not a lot of solar energy about, you have to give robots batteries -- which eventually run out."

Too cool. Not to mention getting rid of the flies.

[noamnety]

1. creepy

Not sure I'm comfortable with the concept of a military machine that powers itself by killing and eating corpses, albeit in this case tiny nonhuman ones.

[indigobusiness]

2. Exactly...Did they forget HAL? And why sewage to attrack flies?

Couldn't they use a flower that stinks like dead meat to attract the flies, or something?

Flesh eating robots is a creepy concept. I don't like where this leads. More cool on its face Pandora's boxism.

[GAspnes]

3. They could make it vegan, I suppose

[NickB79]

4. I am reminded of a bad sci-fi B-movie called "Screamers"

Nations at war over a mineral-rich desert planet used self-replicating robots called screamers to patrol large, empty stretches of territory. They burrowed under the sand and made a screaming noise before they came flying out at high speed, shredding you and using your body to gain fuel and raw material to build more screamers. The screamers began to evolve, and bad things started to happen to the soldiers they were supposed to be guarding....

These things are too creepy for me to find cool.

[htuttle]

5. I want to register my opposition to flesh eating robots of any kind

I've been worrying about this catching on since EcoBot's great grandfater SlugBot (http://www-robotics.usc.edu/~ikelly/tta.html) was built.

It's a just a very bad precedent. Besides, we already HAVE a flesh-eating machine running rampant -- it's called the IMF...

[Demeter]

6. Shades of Asimov!

From his Robot stories: the special-purpose, limited function flycatcher, to overcome the human revulsion of androids!