The rise of the energy autonomous robot

As a keen gardener with a hatred of slugs, my grandfather would have loved the idea of a robot that captures the pests, digests them and uses the resulting energy to catch more.

Unfortunately, he didn’t quite live to see it. And, in any case, the prototype - made by researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab (BRL) in 2000 - didn’t quite work. Its detector/grabber arm could find and capture the slugs fine, but the micro-combustor and methane fuel cell was never going to generate enough energy to let it work autonomously. Nevertheless, it set them on a path to arguably some of the most interesting work in robotics research today.

Giving a public lecture at the TAROS robotics conference in Sheffield last month, Prof Alan Winfield of BRL asserted that if you ’ask any researcher in the field today what the most pressing challenge is in robotics, most would say it’s energy autonomy’. Winfield went on to say that colleagues of his at BRL were leading the world in this regard. Compelled to verify these claims, The Engineer headed to Bristol.