Get the latest tech news
World’s first edible robots clean up water, then become snacks for the fish they help | Shaped like tiny motorboats, these robot are turning the idea of disposable tech into something sustainable — and surprisingly digestible.
If you're releasing a robot into the aquatic environment with no intention of retrieving it, that bot had better be biodegradable. Swiss scientists have gone a step better than that, with li'l robots that can be consumed by fish when their job is done.
More specifically, their hulls are made out of commercial fish feed pellets that have been ground into a powder, mixed with a biopolymer binder, poured into a boat-shaped mold, then freeze-dried. In the center of each robot's body is a chamber filled with a nontoxic powdered mixture of citric acid and sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda). That chamber is sealed with a gel plug on the bottom of the hull, and connected to a propylene-glycol-filled microfluidic reservoir that forms the top layer of the robot's body.
Or read this on r/tech
