Seaswarm: A robot to clean up oil spills?

Seaswarm is pretty similar to Ocean Therapy Solutions’ device which filters crude oil from sea water, because it is designed to specifically siphon crude oil from sea water at a spill site. Ocean Therapy Solutions’ largest device could siphon up to 200 gallons a minute, but Seaswarm claim that as a collective group, their machines can work together to clean even larger areas of ocean.

The machines are around five metres long and two metres wide, and resemble something similar in appearance to a treadmill. Costing $20,000, each machine requires no human intervention and can work independently, and according to Seaswarm can locate a spill and transmit its location to other machines using WiFi and GPS. Collectively the machines will work through polluted ocean, and collect all the oil.

The machines are able to do this by soaking up oil with the tread as it skims over the surface, which uses nanotechnology which attracts oil and repels water. Once the tread has collected its fill – around 20 times its own weight in oil – it will deposit the oil collected in the ocean in a bag which can be collected and reused.

Source: http://www.euinfrastructure.com/news/Seaswarm-A-robot-to-clean-up-oil-spills/