[/caption]In Cambridge, Massachusetts researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a robotic prototype that could autonomously navigate the surface of the ocean to collect surface oil and process it on site. This enables these robots to clean up oil quickly and efficiently.
The system is called Seaswarm. It's a fleet of vehicles that may make cleaning future oil spills both less expensive than current skimming methods, and also more efficient. MIT's Senseable City Lab will unveil the first Seaswarm prototype at the Venice Biennale's Italian Pavilion on Saturday, August 28. The Venice Biennale is an international art, music and architecture festival whose current them addresses who nanotechnology will change the way we live in 2050.
The Seaswarm robot uses a conveyor belt covered with a thin nanowire mesh to absorb oil. MIT Visiting Associate Professor Francesco Stellacci developed the fabric. It was previously featured in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It can absorb up to twenty times its weight in water while repelling water. When the material is heated up, the oil can be removed and burnt locally. Then nanofabric can then be used again.
Continue reading and view a video about Seaswarm robots on the next page.
"We envisioned something that would move as a 'rolling carpet' along the water and seamlessly absorb a surface spill,” said Senseable City Lab Associate Director Assaf Biderman. “This led to the design of a novel marine vehicle: a simple and lightweight conveyor belt that rolls on the surface of the ocean, adjusting to the waves."
The Seaswarm robot is 16 feet long and 7 feet wide. It uses two square meters of solar panels for self-propulsion. It requires just 100 watts to operate. That's the equivalent of an average household light bulb. That means that the robot could potentially clean continuously for weeks.
Traditional skimmers are attached to large vessels and they have the need to constantly return to the shore for maintenance. Seaswarm robots operate by autonomously and they don't require maintenance. Over 800 skimmers were deployed in the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 2010. It's estimated that these skimmers collected only three percent of the surface oil. It's estimated that 5-10 thousand Seaswarm robots would have been able to clean up the oil entirely. It would have costed less, and it would have been done within one month.
The Seaswarm robots coordinate via wireless communication and GPS to ensure an even distribution over an oil spill site.
“We hope that giant oil spills such as the Deepwater Horizon incident will not occur in the future, however, small oil leaks happen constantly in off shore drilling,” Ratti said. “The brief we gave ourselves was to design a simple, inexpensive cleaning system to address this problem.”
As you see above, by developing these robots, they are not hoping for future oil spills, rather, they are preparing a solution to minor oil spills that happen on a daily basis. Why, these robots could even be deployed in bays to clean up any oil that may be on the surface of the water to attract more visitors and tourists.
Below is a video from MIT describing the robots:
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