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These Robots Will Stop the Jellyfish Invasion
Jellyfish* are serious business. If you get enough of them in one place, bad things happen. And we're not just talking about some mildly annoying stings, but all-out nuclear war. Obviously, we have to fight back. With ROBOTS.
In South Korea, jellyfish are threatening marine ecosystems and are responsible for about US $300 million in damage and losses to fisheries, seaside power plants, and other ocean infrastructure. The problem is that you don't just get a few jellyfish. I mean, a few jellyfish would be kind of cute. The problem is that you get thousands of them. Or hundreds of thousands. Or millions, all at once, literally jellying up the works.
Large jellyfish swarms have been drastically increasing over the past decades and have become a problem in many parts of the world, Hyun Myung, a robotics professor at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), tells IEEE Spectrum. And they aren't affecting just marine life and infrastructure. "The number of beachgoers who have been stung by poisonous jellyfish, which can lead to death in extreme cases, has risen," he says. "One child died due to this last year in Korea."
So Professor Myung and his group at KAIST set out to develop a robot to deal with this issue, and last month, they tested out their solution, the Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm (JEROS), in Masan Bay on the southern coast of South Korea. They've built three prototypes like the one shown below.
The JEROS robots are autonomous, able to use cameras to locate jellyfish near the surface, Professor Myung explains. The sequence below shows how an on-board computer processes an image and identifies a jellyfish on the water.
Once the robots have found a group of jellyfish, they team up and float around in formation:
Due to the large number of jellyfish, developing some sort of catch-and-release mechanism is just not feasible, so the robots are equipped with hardware that would probably be considered inhumane to use on anything with a backbone. The following video is NSFLOJ (Not Safe for Lovers of Jellyfish):
Together, the JEROS robots can mulch approximately 900 kilograms of jellyfish per hour. Your typical moon jelly might weigh about 150 grams. You can do the math on that (or we can, it's about 6,000 ex-jellyfish per hour), but the upshot is that we're going to need a lot of these robots in order to make an appreciable difference.
Professor Myung says that, because the robots are designed to work cooperatively, adding more units shouldn't be a problem, and his team is already planning more tests in their efforts to deter the gelatinous invaders.
*Jellyfish are, of course, not fish, so we really should be calling them "jellies" or "sea jellies."
[ KAIST ]
Images: Hyun Myung/KAIST
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/jeros-jellyfish-elimination-robotic-swarm
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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