Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
Winner of the 2022 Natural Robotics Contest, the Robo-Fish named Gillbert, was designed to capture plastic pollution found in waterways, using a microbial fuel cell (MFC) that digests plastic particles to generate energy. In other words, a technology where bacteria breaks down plastic, and a fuel cell converts the energy released into electricity. As a result, the more plastic Gillbert captures, the more energy is generated.
The Natural Robotics Contest was organized by Dr. Robert Siddall, at the University of Surrey (UK), in partnership with the British Ecological Society, and various additional educational institutions and foundations (Siddall et al., 2022). The contest call was for robot ideas that are biomimetic and that do good in the world. In other words, a call for robot ideas that imitate nature. For example, a woodpecker robot that could test the health of trees, or a plant robot that could reinforce a riverbank. As for natural robots doing good in the world, this was understood as an action aligned with the goals to protect nature and to promote biodiversity, set forth at the conclusion of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), held in Montreal, Canada, in 2022.
The contest was also completely crowdsourced, marketed to high schools and college students, mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also open to “anyone” with a bright idea for a robot that “imitates nature and does good”. The grand part of the contest was that the winning entry would actually be prototyped. Prototyping performed by a group of robotic experts and engineers, hailing from such prestigious engineering schools as the Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) or the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Munich, Germany, and the robotics labs at the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom. Finally, from a research standpoint, the investigators correctly hypothesized that the entries would reflect what people cared about most in the environment, as well as the problems they considered most pressing for engineers to solve.
Thus, Gillbert, the 2022 winning entry, submitted by a student named Eleanor Mackintosh, reflected the strong interest for solving ocean pollution, found trending most prominently in the contest entries. Additionally, the Robo-Fish prototype was 3D-printed, so that anyone could get a copy of the Robo-Fish, which also ran on batteries, and thereby multiply Robo-fish goodness in the world.
Gillbert, the name of the fish, would also invoke a significant aspect of the idea, considering that inspiration was drawn from basking sharks. Indeed, basking sharks swim with their massive mouths open to filter tiny zooplankton, krill, and other small organisms from the water. Their mouths have comb-like gill rakers to trap food as water passes through their gills. A passive raking system that enables them to eat a vast amount of food while filtering thousands of gallons of seawater per hour.
Mimicking basking sharks, the Robo-Fish, idea essentially consisted in contaminated water being swallowed by the robot and pushed out, free of plastic particles, through the Robo-Fish gills, covered with mesh filters. Specifically, a filtering system biomimicking basking sharks feeding from zooplankton, krill, and other small organisms caught in their natural gill filtering system.
Below, an image of the winning student entry submitted by Eleanor Mackintosh, and of the prototype put together by robotic experts, interested in Gillbert and the quest to rid oceans of their catastrophic plastic pollution problems. Indeed, by 2050, experts estimate that ocean plastic could exceed fish by weight.
References
Staff (Oct. 20, 2022). Robotics researchers turn the public's ideas into ‘robo-fish’ reality
– University of Surrey, UK.
https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/robotics-researchers-turn-publics-ideas-robo-fish-reality
The Natural Robotics Contest - Call for Entries.
www.naturalroboticscontest.com
Siddall, R., Zufferey, R., Armanini, Sophie., Zhang, Ketao., Sareh, Sina., and Elisavetha Sergeev (Oct. 19, 2022). The Natural Robotics Contest: Crowdsourced Biomimetic Design.
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