jellyfish robots

Did you follow the link to the flying manta ray?

I at one time thought I'd like to make helium floating fish, with solar power which I would release in a large mall atrium. I wondered if the management would adopt them, or clean them out as soon as they could. Anyway, from my pipe-dream to someone else's reality. Their inventions are nice!

Randy

No, I didn't see that.

I really find myself attracted to the idea of building robots and releasing them into the wild. I would want them to have a good chance of long term survival however (years at least).

The idea of a floating fish-bot in a closed mall which did nothing other than "swim" around and try to avoid hitting things (which would also cause it to try and stay away from anyone trying to catch it), sounds fascinating. The idea of a mall filled with 100's of them turning the mall into a big robot aquarium are even more fascinating. Who wouldn't want to visit the mall to see that? If you could create the bots, you could probably tour the country putting them on display in different locations like malls.

It seems however that maintaining their ability to float would be hard. Can you build a helium balloon which could last weeks or months without being refilled?

I had similar thoughts about the helium fish. I figured I could use water as ballast, which would be released to maintain neutral buoyancy. I though if water were sprayed out, in a fine mist, that this would be an acceptable way to dumb ballast. But perhaps we are making it too hard. Just manually adjusting ballast once a day may be enough.

Recharging batteries on a regular basis is another task. Ideally, as a robot, it would find its own charging station. Perhaps a few areas at the ceiling can be made so that the fish can go there to "feed" by simply swimming up to it and making contact with antenna-like devices. They spend the day just swimming until they detect a low battery, and then seek the nearest recharging station.

I doubt it would be viable to have hundreds of fish. Each fist would be a minimum of 3 or 4 feet long. You don't want to crowd them too much.

For a school of small fish, perhaps it is best to make them as a single blimp, with the small fish hanging from a larger blimp like a mobile. (if you put a weight in the nose of the fish, and then hang it from just behind the weight, the fish will act like a wind vain and follow the direction of travel)

Joe Dunfee

So they piss on people as well! Precious! :)

Make them smart enough to water the plants! :)

Finding it's own "food" would be highly important for any type of robot I would set loose in the world with the desire to survive.

I can't help but think how cool it would be to make a robot smart enough to wonder around the world, avoid being caught, but be smart enough to find electrical outlets to charge itself with. :)

The same would be cool if the "fish" were smart enough to swim down and find outlets to plug into if you couldn't get enough power from sunlight so that you wouldn't have to install special power stations for them to dock at.

Well, in a large mall, one with 100+ stores, that's just 1 fish per store on average - not all that crowded - just very "busy" with fish. If you only had something like 10 fish, people would have to run around looking for them before they would find one. It would all depend on how big the location was and how big the fish had to be to carry their hardware. Just one would still be cool.

In my dreams, the fish would be a little overly bouyant, so lacking power to swim down, they'd all collect at the top of the skylight in the mall. That should put them well out of mangements hands. Then when they had recharged from the direct light, they'd take a swim down into the center of things, but not too close to edges or floor.

Might not be practical, as cooling at night might have opposite effect.

Probably need a compressed tank to replace lost helium.

Randy