IN today’s world, water quality is under ever increasing threat from both land and water based human activities.
I recently found a news report in Scientific American that, at one level, was a very informative feature that communicated some fascinating information on technological advances. But at another level, it’s a worrying sign of the times. The report described how scientists in the United States have developed a robotic fish, complete with onboard sensors and wireless capabilities, to monitor water quality in lakes rivers and oceans. Yes, a robofish is being designed to patrol for algal blooms, oil spills and other pollutants.
Researchers from Michigan State University are hoping to take water quality monitoring to a new level by building robots with the speed, agility and coordination of real fish. The prototype robot fish look a little bit like the singing “Big Mouth Billy Bass” and have flexible fins made of electroactive polymers that move in response to electricity, just like vertebrate muscles. The artificial muscles work the other way too: bend them, and they generate an electric current. This reportedly allows the robofish to “sense” motion in the water, just like real fish do. The artificial muscle comes in flat strips, but by binding several strips of artificial muscle together in sheets, the researchers can make flexible artificial fins that twist, curl and bend in complex ways, just like the real thing.
The researchers’ goal is to develop artificial fish that can swim and dart just like real fish. By powering their fish with fins, the team hopes to make aquatic robots that are smaller, cheaper and quieter than they could ever make with propeller-driven vehicles. The next step is to design fish that can swim deep underwater and against strong currents. This is because the scientists envisage that, in the future, a whole fleet of robofish can spread out over a pond or lake, collecting and sending a continuous stream of fine-scale data about water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and other environmental variables at a level of resolution that traditional water quality testing can’t match.
Some of the potential drawbacks to the idea are thought to be predation by real fish, and possibly even angler interactions. Eve so, the idea could still have legs. Anglers would no doubt release the robofish unharmed in the hope that the threat of litigation (based on real time water quality information obtained by covert piscatorial probes) would prompt polluters to clean up their act, which has to be a good thing for our lakes, rivers and inshore areas in todays world.
The original article can be found at:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/09/19/synchronized-swimming-patrolling-for-pollution-with-robotic-fish/
