Pollution-hunting fish take to sea
London: Robot “fish” developed by European scientists to improve
pollution monitoring moved from the lab to the sea in a test at the
northern Spanish port of Gijon on Tuesday. The developers hope the new
technology, which reduces the time it takes to detect a pollutant from
weeks to seconds, will sell to port authorities, water companies,
aquariums and anyone with an interest in monitoring water quality.
It
could also have spin-offs for cleaning up oil spills, underwater
security, diver monitoring or search and rescue at sea, they said.
The
fish, which are 1.5 meters (5 feet) long and currently cost 20,000
pounds ($31,600) each, are designed to swim like real fish and are
fitted with sensors to pick up pollutants leaking from ships or
undersea pipelines.
They swim independently, co-ordinate with each
other, and transmit their readings back to a shore station up to a
kilometre away. “Chemical sensors fitted to the fish permit real-time,
in-situ analysis, rather than the current method of sample collection
and dispatch to a shore based laboratory,” said Luke Speller, a
scientist at British consultancy BMT Group who led the project. The fish
can avoid obstacles, communicate with each other, map where they are
and know how to return to base when their eight-hour battery life is
running low, their makers say.
After the tests this week, the team
will look at modifications needed to move the fish into commercial
production, which they expect to reduce the cost of each unit.
The
development project was part-funded by the EU and drew on expertise from
the University of Essex and the University of Strathclyde in Britain,
Ireland's Tyndall National Institute and Thales Safare, a unit of
Europe's largest defence electronics group, Thales, which was
responsible for the communication technology.