The systems the EU is buying for a pollution control project are one of the rare robotic systems shaped like animals for practical reasons, not just for looks.
The 2.5 million-pound ($3.6 million) contract was awarded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for SHOAL a project whose name looks like an acronym but isn’t, whose goal is to use robot fish to sniff out and report pollution in Europe’s harbors and rivers.
EU countries currently spend about $350 million per year on detection of pollution in its ports, but often either overlooks new sources of pollution, or identifies them too late – after a ship has left port, for example.
The idea behind the fish swarm is to use “hybrid particle swarm/ant colony optimization techniques,” according to the EU’s spec on the project. The upshot is that the EU hopes the robot fish and the chemical sensors they’ll carry will be more efficient at patrolling ports in search of pollutants than paying humans in a boat to check one ship at a time and detect pollution long after the damage is done, or even after the culprit has left.
The first of the fish-shaped inspectors will be released in the Port of Gijon in northern Spain as part of a three-year research project. They are expected to hit the water sometime next summer.
The fish are designed to move largely underneath ships and near sewage outflow pipes to detect pollution almost as soon as it begins. They will be able to communicate with directors on shore via WiFi and with each other to help coordinate their search patterns, and build up a near-real-time picture of pollutants in the harbor, according to Huosheng Hu the professor of engineering at Essex University who is actually building the fish.
That they’re shaped like fish is more for the efficiency of the thing than the look, according to the engineering company in charge of coordinating the effort.
Over millions of years fish have developed an astonishingly efficient design for moving through water quickly and avoiding tangles and other dangers, according to Rory Doyle, chief engineer on the project for BMT Group, Ltd. engineering consultancy in London.
BMT is coordinating the project on behalf of the EU, but the fish themselves will be built, at an estimated cost of $29,000 apiece, by Huosheng Hu, John Gan, Dongbing Gu and a team of robotics professors, engineers and students in the Human Centered Robotics Group at Essex University, northeast of London.
The inspector fish aren’t the first Hu and the Human Centered Robotics Group has built. They built a smaller version under contract to the London Aquarium as a way to model the way fish swim (video).
The larger, more advanced version, which will be about five feet long rather than three, will have to be much more advanced in their behavior-based control systems to be able to swim and navigate effectively on their own, Hu said. The group is still working on those controls as well as the systems to allow individual fish to collaborate to cover a large, three-dimensional area most effectively.
Hu calls the need for full autonomy, data security, communication and energy “interesting challenges.”