Reservoir 'swans': Aquatic robots deployed to monitor water pollution without disturbing surroundings

RT
Mon, 15 Jan 2018 15:49 UTC

Singapore has begun deploying robot 'swans' at several of its major reservoirs to monitor water quality without disturbing the beauty of the natural surroundings.

The Smart Water Assessment Network (SWAN) robots will collect and transmit water quality data in real time using a series of sensors. The 'swans' were jointly designed by Singapore's national water agency PUB, the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Environmental Research Institute and the Tropical Marine Science Institute.

"We started with a number of smaller bird models, before we decided on the swan. It's just the right size," said Assistant Professor Mandar Chitre, one of the project's lead researchers, as cited by Channel News Asia. "If you look at it in the environment, it just looks like a swan swimming around."

Testing on the robots' sampling, navigation and power usage was completed in 2016, and they will now be deployed to the Marina, Punggol, Serangoon, Pandan and Kranji reservoirs. The robots will help combat higher levels of algae growth in the Kranji and Pandan reservoirs.

"The robot swan currently carries standard, commercially-available sensors for measuring parameters such as Chlorophyll-a, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, and blue-green algae, and can be extended to include new sensors. Combined with real data delivery, the NUSwan potentially serves a wide range of applications, such as water body surveillance, autonomous spot water sampling, and pollutant tracking, and has the potential to be integrated as part of early warning and decision support systems," Singapore's Public Utilities Board said on its website.

Designed to blend into their surroundings, the swans connect via WIFI to the cloud, naturally, and send back sample data in realtime, reducing man hours greatly. The bots will be remotely controlled from anywhere with an internet connection but they are designed to be as autonomous as possible.

Reader Comments

Rowan Cocoan · 2018-01-16T13:44:15Z

Why can't we do that?

Oh yeah, we need our taxes spent to buy more obsolete, PRE-completion/operational status F-35s when there's no one to fight them against, except, if we poke the bear hard enough, maybe we'll learn what they can do vs. an operational Su-57.

But that would be far riskier than the reasons they were really built for:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy -- his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter--set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four.

R.C.

* RC added double hyphen after 'enjoy', to the copy I downloaded long ago.

RC

Illusionoffreedom · 2018-01-17T19:15:23Z

Yep, and they (those human looking lizards that run things) have become addicted to it. The war material culture model that was created cant last forever like they want it to, but they will sure try!

Living not far from Davis-Monthan air force base, one can visually see billions and billions and billions of dollars and human man-hours labor, and material wasting away in the desert. Then one thinks about the homeless and other humans who have nothing. And the city saying they have no money. And whenever one of the lizards says there is no money for this or that, (but sure as hell money to build that missile or those bullets)

Power needs to be taken away from whom currently has it.

A convenient excuse for the severe fuel and fertilizer shortage caused by the US / Israeli war ?

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Reservoir 'swans': Aquatic robots deployed to monitor water pollution without disturbing surroundings

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