EU Commissions Swarm of Robot Fish to Sniff Out Pollution in Ports

Researchers in Southern England have won part of a European Union contract with a sophisticated, autonomous, marine-locomotive pollution detector that looks astonishingly like a fish. The 2.5 million-pound ($3.6 million) contract was awarded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for SHOAL a project whose name looks like an acronym but isn’t, whose goal is to use robot fish to sniff out and report pollution in Europe’s harbors and rivers. EU countries currently spend about $350 million per year on detection of pollution in its ports, but often either overlooks new sources of pollution, or identifies them too late – after a ship has left port, for example. The idea behind the fish swarm is to use “hybrid particle swarm/ant colony optimization techniques,” according to the EU’s… View this post