Smelly robot eats flies to power itself

[Champ]

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies.



The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects' skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current.


"Called EcoBot II, the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring of, say, temperature or toxic gas concentrations," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.


Chris Melhuish and his team, who are developing the robot, have to manually feed the flies to EcoBot II because they are still designing some type of pump to suck the insects into it.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=856&ncid=856&e=1&u=/nm/20040908/od_uk_nm/oukoe_science_robot

[htuttle]

1. This is the second flesh-eating robot I've heard of

The other is SlugBot (from 2001):
http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,47156,00.html

I think it's a REALLY TERRIBLE PRECEDENT TO SET! THIS COULD ALL GO TERRIBLY WRONG!

Just saying...