Meet the "Row-bot," a robot that cleans up pollution and generates the electricity needed to power itself by swallowing dirty water. Roboticist Jonathan Rossiter explains how this special swimming machine, which uses a microbial fuel cell to neutralize algal blooms and oil slicks, could be a precursor to biodegradable, autonomous pollution-fighting robots.

T-N-S-Y

00:00

Hi, I'm an engineer and I make robots. Now,of course you all know what a robot is, right? If you don't, you'd probably goto Google, and you'd ask Google what a robot is. So let's do that. We'll go toGoogle and this is what we get. Now, you can see here there are lots ofdifferent types of robots, but they're predominantly humanoid in structure. Andthey look pretty conventional because they've got plastic, they've got metal,they've got motors and gears and so on. Some of them look quite friendly, and youcould go up and you could hug them. Some of them not so friendly, they looklike they're straight out of "Terminator," in fact they may well bestraight out of "Terminator." You can do lots of really cool thingswith these robots -- you can do really exciting stuff.

00:44

But I'd like to look at different kinds ofrobots -- I want to make different kinds of robots. And I take inspiration fromthe things that don't look like us, but look like these. So these are naturalbiological organisms and they do some really cool things that we can't, andcurrent robots can't either. They do all sorts of great things like movingaround on the floor; they go into our gardens and they eat our crops; theyclimb trees; they go in water, they come out of water; they trap insects anddigest them. So they do really interesting things. They live, they breathe,they die, they eat things from the environment. Our current robots don't reallydo that. Now, wouldn't it be great if you could use some of thosecharacteristics in future robots so that you could solve some reallyinteresting problems? I'm going to look at a couple of problems now in theenvironment where we can use the skills and the technologies derived from theseanimals and from the plants, and we can use them to solve those problems.

01:42

Let's have a look at two environmentalproblems. They're both of our making -- this is man interacting with theenvironment and doing some rather unpleasant things. The first one is to dowith the pressure of population. Such is the pressure of population around theworld that agriculture and farming is required to produce more and more crops.Now, to do that, farmers put more and more chemicals onto the land. They put onfertilizers, nitrates, pesticides -- all sorts of things that encourage thegrowth of the crops, but there are some negative impacts. One of the negativeimpacts is if you put lots of fertilizer on the land, not all of it goes intothe crops. Lots of it stays in the soil, and then when it rains, these chemicalsgo into the water table. And in the water table, then they go into streams,into lakes, into rivers and into the sea. Now, if you put all of thesechemicals, these nitrates, into those kinds of environments, there areorganisms in those environments that will be affected by that -- algae, forexample. Algae loves nitrates, it loves fertilizer, so it will take in allthese chemicals, and if the conditions are right, it will mass produce. It willproduce masses and masses of new algae. That's called a bloom. The trouble isthat when algae reproduces like this, it starves the water of oxygen. As soonas you do that, the other organisms in the water can't survive. So, what do wedo? We try to produce a robot that will eat the algae, consume it and make itsafe.

03:14

So that's the first problem. The secondproblem is also of our making, and it's to do with oil pollution. Now, oilcomes out of the engines that we use, the boats that we use. Sometimes tankersflush their oil tanks into the sea, so oil is released into the sea that way.Wouldn't it be nice if we could treat that in some way using robots that couldeat the pollution the oil fields have produced? So that's what we do. We makerobots that will eat pollution.

03:43

To actually make the robot, we takeinspiration from two organisms. On the right there you see the basking shark.The basking shark is a massive shark. It's noncarnivorous, so you can swim withit, as you can see. And the basking shark opens its mouth, and it swims throughthe water, collecting plankton. As it does that, it digests the food, and thenit uses that energy in its body to keep moving. So, could we make a robot likethat -- like the basking shark that chugs through the water and eats uppollution? Well, let's see if we can do that. But also, we take the inspirationfrom other organisms. I've got a picture here of a water boatman, and the waterboatman is really cute. When it's swimming in the water, it uses itspaddle-like legs to push itself forward.

04:29

So we take those two organisms and wecombine them together to make a new kind of robot. In fact, because we're usingthe water boatman as inspiration, and our robot sits on top of the water, andit rows, we call it the "Row-bot." So a Row-bot is a robot that rows.OK. So what does it look like? Here's some pictures of the Row-bot, and you'llsee, it doesn't look anything like the robots we saw right at the beginning.Google is wrong; robots don't look like that, they look like this.

05:01

So I've got the Row-bot here. I'll justhold it up for you. It gives you a sense of the scale, and it doesn't lookanything like the others. OK, so it's made out of plastic, and we'll have alook now at the components that make up the Row-bot -- what makes it reallyspecial.

05:15

The Row-bot is made up of three parts, andthose three parts are really like the parts of any organism. It's got a brain,it's got a body and it's got a stomach. It needs the stomach to create theenergy. Any Row-bot will have those three components, and any organism willhave those three components, so let's go through them one at a time. It has abody, and its body is made out of plastic, and it sits on top of the water. Andit's got flippers on the side here -- paddles that help it move, just like thewater boatman. It's got a plastic body, but it's got a soft rubber mouth here,and a mouth here -- it's got two mouths. Why does it have two mouths? One is tolet the food go in and the other is to let the food go out. So you can seereally it's got a mouth and a derriere, or a --

06:04

(Laughter)

06:05

something where the stuff comes out, whichis just like a real organism. So it's starting to look like that basking shark.So that's the body.

06:13

The second component might be the stomach.We need to get the energy into the robot and we need to treat the pollution, sothe pollution goes in, and it will do something. It's got a cell in the middlehere called a microbial fuel cell. I'll put this down, and I'll lift up thefuel cell. Here. So instead of having batteries, instead of having aconventional power system, it's got one of these. This is its stomach. And itreally is a stomach because you can put energy in this side in the form ofpollution, and it creates electricity.

06:43

So what is it? It's called a microbial fuelcell. It's a little bit like a chemical fuel cell, which you might have comeacross in school, or you might've seen in the news. Chemical fuel cells takehydrogen and oxygen, and they can combine them together and you getelectricity. That's well-established technology; it was in the Apollo spacemissions. That's from 40, 50 years ago. This is slightly newer. This is amicrobial fuel cell. It's the same principle: it's got oxygen on one side, butinstead of having hydrogen on the other, it's got some soup, and inside thatsoup there are living microbes. Now, if you take some organic material -- couldbe some waste products, some food, maybe a bit of your sandwich -- you put it inthere, the microbes will eat that food, and they will turn it into electricity.Not only that, but if you select the right kind of microbes, you can use themicrobial fuel cell to treat some of the pollution. If you choose the rightmicrobes, the microbes will eat the algae. If you use other kinds of microbes,they will eat petroleum spirits and crude oil. So you can see how this stomachcould be used to not only treat the pollution but also to generate electricityfrom the pollution. So the robot will move through the environment, taking foodinto its stomach, digest the food, create electricity, use that electricity tomove through the environment and keep doing this.

08:05

OK, so let's see what happens when we runthe Row-bot -- when it does some rowing. Here we've got a couple of videos, thefirst thing you'll see -- hopefully you can see here is the mouth open. Thefront mouth and the bottom mouth open, and it will stay opened enough, then therobot will start to row forward. It moves through the water so that food goesin as the waste products go out. Once it's moved enough, it stops and then itcloses the mouth -- slowly closes the mouths -- and then it will sit there, andit will digest the food.

08:38

Of course these microbial fuel cells, theycontain microbes. What you really want is lots of energy coming out of thosemicrobes as quickly as possible. But we can't force the microbes and theygenerate a small amount of electricity per second. They generate milliwatts, ormicrowatts. Let's put that into context. Your mobile phone for example, one ofthese modern ones, if you use it, it takes about one watt. So that's a thousandor a million times as much energy that that uses compared to the microbial fuelcell. How can we cope with that? Well, when the Row-bot has done its digestion,when it's taken the food in, it will sit there and it will wait until it hasconsumed all that food. That could take some hours, it could take some days. Atypical cycle for the Row-bot looks like this: you open your mouth, you move,you close your mouth and you sit there for a while waiting. Once you digestyour food, then you can go about doing the same thing again. But you know what,that looks like a real organism, doesn't it? It looks like the kind of thing wedo. Saturday night, we go out, open our mouths, fill our stomachs, sit in frontof the telly and digest. When we've had enough, we do the same thing again.

09:48

OK, if we're lucky with this cycle, at theend of the cycle we'll have enough energy left over for us to be able to dosomething else. We could send a message, for example. We could send a messagesaying, "This is how much pollution I've eaten recently," or,"This is the kind of stuff that I've encountered," or, "This iswhere I am." That ability to send a message saying, "This is where Iam," is really, really important. If you think about the oil slicks thatwe saw before, or those massive algal blooms, what you really want to do is putyour Row-bot out there, and it eats up all of those pollutions, and then youhave to go collect them. Why? Because these Row-bots at the moment, thisRow-bot I've got here, it contains motors, it contains wires, it containscomponents which themselves are not biodegradable. Current Row-bots containthings like toxic batteries. You can't leave those in the environment, so youneed to track them, and then when they've finished their job of work, you needto collect them. That limits the number of Row-bots you can use. If, on theother hand, you have robot a little bit like a biological organism, when itcomes to the end of its life, it dies and it degrades to nothing.

10:55

So wouldn't it be nice if these robots,instead of being like this, made out of plastic, were made out of othermaterials, which when you throw them out there, they biodegrade to nothing?That changes the way in which we use robots. Instead of putting 10 or 100 outinto the environment, having to track them, and then when they die, collectthem, you could put a thousand, a million, a billion robots into theenvironment. Just spread them around. You know that at the end of their lives,they're going to degrade to nothing. You don't need to worry about them. Sothat changes the way in which you think about robots and the way you deploythem.

11:29

Then the question is: Can you do this?Well, yes, we have shown that you can do this. You can make robots which arebiodegradable. What's really interesting is you can use household materials tomake these biodegradable robots. I'll show you some; you might be surprised.You can make a robot out of jelly. Instead of having a motor, which we have atthe moment, you can make things called artificial muscles. Artificial musclesare smart materials, you apply electricity to them, and they contract, or theybend or they twist. They look like real muscles. So instead of having a motor,you have these artificial muscles. And you can make artificial muscles out ofjelly. If you take some jelly and some salts, and do a bit of jiggery-pokery,you can make an artificial muscle.

12:10

We've also shown you can make the microbialfuel cell's stomach out of paper. So you could make the whole robot out ofbiodegradable materials. You throw them out there, and they degrade to nothing.

12:23

Well, this is really, really exciting. It'sgoing to totally change the way in which we think about robots, but also itallows you to be really creative in the way in which you think about what youcan do with these robots. I'll give you an example. If you can use jelly tomake a robot -- now, we eat jelly, right? So, why not make something like this?A robot gummy bear. Here, I've got some I prepared earlier. There we go. I'vegot a packet -- and I've got a lemon-flavored one. I'll take this gummy bear --he's not robotic, OK? We have to pretend. And what you do with one of these isyou put it in your mouth -- the lemon's quite nice. Try not to chew it toomuch, it's a robot, it may not like it. And then you swallow it. And then itgoes into your stomach. And when it's inside your stomach, it moves, it thinks,it twists, it bends, it does something. It could go further down into yourintestines, find out whether you've got some ulcer or cancer, maybe do aninjection, something like that. You know that once it's done its job of work,it could be consumed by your stomach, or if you don't want that, it could gostraight through you, into the toilet, and be degraded safely in theenvironment. So this changes the way, again, in which we think about robots.

13:38

So, we started off looking at robots thatwould eat pollution, and then we're looking at robots which we can eat. I hopethis gives you some idea of the kinds of things we can do with future robots.

13:51

Thank you very much for your attention.

13:53

(Applause)