Massive oil spills like the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster earlier this year are fortunately rare. Unfortunately, smaller scale ocean pollution isn’t, and it causes enough damage to alter ecosystems and affect fish stocks. A key to protecting the oceans—and related industries—is collecting regular data on pollution levels to help target clean-up efforts and prevent large scale events from happening. But considering how large the world’s oceans are, how can we monitor them effectively and cheaply?
Dr. Huosheng Hu of the University of Essex has a rather elegant solution: setting loose a fleet of robotic fish to continually monitor water quality, without the costly man-hours of sending marine scientists out on boats. Huosheng’s working towards a future where artificially intelligent, self-sustaining robot fish swim alongside their living brethren, continually sending data about water conditions via wireless signals to collection points on shore.
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As futuristic as his idea seems, Huosheng’s already put his robot fish to work. Under a $3.6 million grant from the European Union, a school of Huosheng’s five-foot-long battery-powered fish are cruising through the Spanish port of Gijon. The fish are intelligent enough to avoid getting run over by ships, and are able to communicate with each other via a form of sonar to help coordinate their efforts. All the while they transmit data from different depths and locations, offering a three-dimensional picture of Gijon’s water quality. And near the end of their eight-hour battery capacity, they automatically swim back to a charging hub to prepare for their next stint.
In the fifth episode of our Upgrade series, Motherboard visits Dr. Huosheng Hu’s lab in England to check out the breadth of his many projects involving robotics and artificial intelligence. Huosheng talks to us about using biomimicry to develop solutions to the world’s environmental problems and his curious love for fish, robotic and otherwise.
By Derek Mead
