Posted on 01/02/2008 9:13:12 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Japanese Robot Eats Snow, Poops Out Bricks of Ice
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
What's cute, yellow, eats snow and poops out bricks of ice?
Meet Yuki-taro, a Japanese robot built to quickly clear roads after heavy snows.
The cute little guy, about 5 feet long and 2 and a half feet high, simply plows into snowbanks, taking in the white stuff, compressing it and neatly stacking it in two-foot-long bricks on his rear bed.
Created by a consortium of private companies, municipal governments and university researchers, Yuki-taro is equipped with two video cameras in his "eyes" as well as a GPS tracking system to be completely self-guided.
The prototype has already won a design award, and doctored photos of it modified to look like the popular Pokemon character Pikachu have popped up online.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
At this size, it doesn't seem very useful. On the other hand, a device which could quickly turn large quantities of snow into transportable bricks of solid ice without using too much energy could be very useful for things like airports.
Big deal! I know an Eskimo in Inuktuk who can do the same, and his piss freezes before it hits the ground. (He calls it having a tinkle!).
I think I’d vote for it over any of the other presidential candidates.
Ordinarily you would be right , but it is not useless. The Japanese are extremely energy conscious. They spend millions on making ice for their highly active fish markets. Japans major protein source is fish from around the shores of Japan, especially bonito Tuna.
The Japnese are real sticklers for freshness in their fish, and it is highly iced without being frozen a lot of the time.
Instead of making ice and consuming the fuel to do so, they will simply stack these bricks in cold storage and use them to save on ice production.
The guy who made this machine will be an instant millionaire.
Awesome!
Just in case I dont have ice for my party and it’s MINUS 0 outside, I can just use the robot to scoop the ice on my driveway and WALA! INSTANT ICE.
Those Japs!
“Great Googly Moogly!”
It's a great product for the Eskimo market: prefabbed Igloo blocks.
Aha, crop circles!
This is news? Hah! Al Gore eats BS and poops out global warming.
Snow: Space-filling stuff that blocks roads. Ice bricks: Less space, more useful. Ice bricks can be used to cool perishables, or can even be efficiently packed and moved to places that need water. Or stacked to build igloos, or compressed together as a medium for ice scuplture.
If they can make it affordable, it's more utilitarian than a conventional snowplow, snow shovel, snow blower or salt truck, and I'm told those things sell pretty well.
We have a lake that poops out snow and it turns into a block of ice every time it rains and freezes again.
Well, there you go -- instead of building these little robots, all we need to do is create a lake, generate snow, make it rain, and then make it freeze. Good plan.
Me too, although I just bet that Hillary can poop out some ice with the best of them.
Yes, I know that I have the emotional maturity of your average six-year old... So what?
You don't need a bigger machine. You just need more machines. Think parallel. A bunch of little snow-eating-ice-excreting robots is more nimble and effective than one big machine. There have been plenty of projects with robots that work autonomously, form ad hoc networks, coordinate with each other without human intervention, and go back to base when their ice beds are full or their batteries are getting low.
Not bigger machines, more machines. The hive is the organism. Build enough, and some are always recharging while others are working. They can run 24/7/365. And when one place needs fewer and another needs more, you throw them on a truck or a train car and ship them to where they're needed.
Picture a swarm of robots acting in a seemingly random way, but with an internal logic and a human override that can send them all back to their docks. A beehive and an ant mound are remarkably efficient models of cooperation among simple, small, weak creatures. Replicate that with machines, and you've got something.
It's a fundamental re-thinking of the whole model of automation. Instead of building a few big machines that function like humans, build a lot of small machines that work together like an ant mound or a prairie dog colony or a flock of geese or a herd of elk.
I’m totally with you on all points, especially the maturity thing. My wife is always after me about my juvenile sense of humor.
If it doesn’t sell as a sidewalk clearer, maybe they could sell it to Eskimos as a brick maker for igloos.
The Martians are comming! The good news is they eat Hillarys and piss gasoline.
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