The rise of the energy autonomous robot As a keen gardener with
a hatred of slugs, my grandfather would have loved the idea of a
robot that captures the pests, digests them and uses the
resulting energy to catch more. Unfortunately, he didn’t quite
live to see it. And, in any case, the prototype - made by
researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab (BRL) in 2000 - didn’t quite
work. Its detector/grabber arm could find and capture the slugs
fine, but the micro-combustor and methane fuel cell was never
going to generate enough energy to let it work autonomously.
Nevertheless, it set them on a path to arguably some of the most
interesting work in robotics research today. Giving a public
lecture at the TAROS robotics conference in Sheffield last
month, Prof Alan Winfield of BRL asserted that if you ’ask any
researcher in the field today what the most pressing challenge
is in robotics, most would say it’s energy autonomy’. Winfield
went on to say that colleagues of his at BRL were leading the
world in this regard. Compell