| | By Darleen Hartley @ Sunday, March 22, 2009 10:30 PM
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| | Blimey - Looks like a fish, swims like a fish, but sniffs like a puppy dog. A robotic mechanism developed by a team of scientists and researchers in England is acting as a pollutant policeman.
 Outfitted with WiFi equipment, the test school of robo-fish will ply the sea off Spain for offending odors. Jimmy Durante’s nose was never this expensive. Each specimen runs $29,000. Compare that cost, though, to the cost of the Exxon Valdez mess off Alaska a few years ago. Hopefully, problems will be uncovered much sooner and prevented.
Testing will take place off the port of Gijon. Professor Huosheng Hu, head of the robotics team at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, said: “We are designing these fish very carefully to ensure that they will be able to detect changes in environmental conditions in the port and pick up on early signs of pollution spreading, for example by locating a small leak in a vessel.”
Unlike earlier robotic fish, which needed remote controls, these scale-covered devices will be able to navigate independently without any human interaction. They can swim 24/7 without anyone needing to receive overtime pay.
The robot took on a fish shape rather than the conventional mini submarine design. Rory Doyle, senior research scientist at BMT Group, explained, 'In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years' worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient. This efficiency is something we need to ensure that our pollution detection sensors can navigate in the underwater environment for hours on end.'
The European Commission funded the research which has been on-going for three years. The project was co-ordinated by BMT Group, an independent engineering and risk management consultancy. Five fish are being built by Professor Hu and his robotics team. They should be ready to try out their wings, uh, fins, in the sea by fall 2010. These expensive, though very pretty, creatures are compared to a seal in size, and can swim a little more than three feet a second.
Swimming on their own, they will return automatically to their hub about every eight hours as battery life drops and they need recharging. Via WiFi, they will transmit information to the control center, enabling their handlers to map the source and scale of any pollution in real time. Future plans are to take the robo-fish from the sea into rivers and lakes looking for pollutants in waters around the world.
Pollutants are blamed for mutations of animals in the wild, and are considered harmful to humans as well. Critics of Canada’s oil sands industry pointed a finger at them when a Lake Athabasca fish thought to be harmed by pollutants was discovered. A conference of Keepers of the Water highlighted the abnormal fish. Concerns were raised because the Alberta community has abnormally high rates of rare cancer and other ailments among the small native population.
The goldeye looked oddly disfigured, but Joe Nelson, professor emeritus of biological sciences at the University of Alberta laid fears to rest with an explanation of the unrelated cause. Yet he said, 'It's right to have concerns, and if there are pollutants that do get into the river, then one wants to be certain what the effects are, whether it be human health or not.' X
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