Sewer Robot Luigi: I'm Deeply Defiled to Help You Monitor Your City's Health Status | 新智造

Xin Zhi Zao Press: This article comes from Daily Mail, author Stacy Liberatore, compiled by Xin Zhi Zhi exclusive, refused to reprint without permission!

As everyone knows, sewer workers are an extremely hard and thankless job. However, as everyone knows, there is now a sewer robot that is working in lieu of human workers.

In Cambridge, Mass., Luigi is walking through the sewers to collect data on 107,000 people in the city. Developed by the Senseable City Laboratory at MIT, this robot comes from a project called Underworlds (Underground World) that analyzes human waste to monitor the health of the entire city.

Luigi can be fully controlled using a smartphone and will enter every sewer in the city for one to two hours, determine the range with ultrasonic sensors, use pumps to absorb liquids, filters prevent debris from entering, pipelines record viruses and bacteria, analyze biology and chemistry molecular. The robot is equipped with a probe hole and GPS, so that researchers can track the trajectory.

Carlo Ratti, head of Senseable City Laboratory, said:

We can expose places that the city cannot see. Each cell in the human body has approximately 10 bacterial cells, which can constitute a human microbiome. Recent studies have shown that: Microbial groups play a decisive role in human health. So how do we evaluate the microbiology of the entire city? Now, our solution is to let Luigi help.

After Luigi collected the dirt, Ratti and his team were able to test samples, monitor urban infectious diseases and epidemics in real time, and understand human health and behavior.

In addition to detecting human epidemics, Luigi can also monitor non-transmitted diseases such as obesity and diabetes, and can even monitor toxic substances in wastewater from factories. Of course, the principles are the same, all of which are through the analysis of biological and chemical molecular components in sewage.

In Ratti's view, these data can help them assess the impact of the current urban public health policy on residents, such as whether the tax on sugar will change the residents' eating habits.

Even more ambitious is that if you observe and use the data of population and regional distribution of the entire city, researchers can understand how the urban environment and other external factors affect our health. It is possible to establish a new census of urban health.

According to Christian Daughton, a chemist from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,

This project of MIT is very ambitious and also groundbreaking. If this project is successful, then we will take a big step in real-time public health monitoring.

Ratti and his team will design solutions that allow robots to perform their tasks autonomously; at the same time, they will process the samples and feed them back to scientists in real time.

According to the "Wall Street Journal" report: "Underground World" will end in November 2018. A Kuwaiti foundation has invested 4 million U.S. dollars in it and it will be possible to introduce it into Kuwait in the future.

However, the project is also facing no small challenge. Tim Spector, a professor at King's College London, said in an interview with The Guardian:

I think this is only an attempt to a large extent, because sorting so many ingredients in the sewage is very trivial and should be very difficult.

Luigi is now only used in Cambridge and Boston. It is reported that before this, the team created a prototype of a sewer robot called Mario. However, Mario is often blocked by trash while carrying out tasks; at the same time, unlike Luigi, which can be operated with a smartphone, Mario needs to be manually operated; in addition, researchers say that their batteries also have a fire risk. Therefore, Luigi has taken a further step on the basis of Mario.

Via:Daily Mail

Xinzhi created the public number of the robot under the leadership of Lei Feng Network (search for "Lei Feng Net" public number) . We are concerned about the status quo and future of robots, and related industries combined with robots. Interested friends can add micro signal AIRobotics, or directly scan the QR code below to follow!