Biomass robot eats food, requires litter box

(photo via inhabitat)

Researchers at the University of Bristol are hard at work designing robots that can draw power by digesting food. Their latest offering is Ecobot III, which feeds on processed sewage. This doesn’t sound appetizing to me, however it is apparently just the thing that its 48 microbial food cells want to munch on. The microbes extract energy from the food by digesting it, and the robot extracts some of it by harvesting the electrons put off by the microbes. It was apparently able to extract enough energy from to move around and do its robot business, returning to feed and purge when necessary. [via inhabitat]