How do you monitor water pollution levels in harbours around the world in an affordable, non-invasive, thorough, and sustainable manner?  How about by using a robotic carp?

Professor Huosheng Hu and his students at the University of Essex have developed a 150cm metal carp designed to patrol marine environments detecting pollution, especially point sources such as leaks in ships or pipelines.  Says the lab website: “Instead of the conventional rotary propeller used in ship or underwater vehicles, the undulation movement provides the main energy of a robotic fish. The observation on a real fish shows that this kind of propulsion is more noiseless, effective, and manoeuvrable than the propeller-based propulsion. The aim of our project is to design and build autonomous robotic fishes that are able to reactive to the environment and navigate toward the charging station. In other words, they should have the features such as fish-swimming behaviour, autonomously navigating ability, cartoon-like appearance that is not-existed in the real world.” With a swimming speed of around 1m/s and a battery life of around 8 hours before autonomously returning to the recharge station, these robots can cover a lot of ground.

Says the prof, “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.  The hope is that this will prevent potentially hazardous discharges at sea, as the leak would undoubtedly get worse over time if not located.”

Though the pilot project is limited to Gijon, Spain, I can easily see these fish being used in shipping hubs around the world.   Though the cost of 20,000 GBP ($36,000 CDN) per fish is steep for a university project funded primarily by an aquarium (the London Aquarium has chipped in around $275,000 CDN), with mass production (relatively) of these robots combined with the crazy budgets of governments and for-profit harbours, deploying them worldwide doesn’t seem to me like it would be much of a problem.  And if they can find oil leaks on ships that are docked and get them fixed before the ship heads out, there should be some real benefits to oceans everywhere.

Awesome YouTube of the fish swimming - CHECK THIS

Via:

Practical Fishkeeping
BMT Group