Robot Reviews

Late last week, we brought to you the story of the fly-eating robot. Apparently, some innovative people had other, bigger things in mind. Robotic Technology Inc. and Cyclone Power Technologies have partnered and successfully completed the first stage of their ambitious project - to build the first ever foraging and eating robot.

Aptly called Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot or EATR, this machine is designed to be fully autonomous; able to differentiate between biomass sources from those that are not, such as stones and glass before actually processing them into fuel. Whenever conventional fuels such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene and coal are available, it can temporarily shift to gas-guzzling mode. All these will be done without any human controlling it. 

The objectives of the prototype are already daunting themselves. Aside from having to identify suitable biomass items, the system will have to learn how to spatially locate them first. Once found, the items should be collected. This will involve actions like grasping, cutting, shredding, and lifting. Finally, which is perhaps the easiest part, is to extract stored energy from the collected items. 

This is a very interesting project indeed, whose success can pave the way to countless possibilities - that of being able to send unmanned machines to regions where humans will have difficulty surviving. I just hope these robots are going to be programmed to be vegetarians. We're not just talking about small bug-eating robots here. These machines are expected to be rolling androids whose sizes can be comparable to ours.