Robot Will Use Your Home’s Dirt As A Power Source

By Nick Venable | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Robot

Since I started writing for this website, I’ve noticed — though I’ve pretended not to — the Giant Freakin’ Robots lurking around behind me, blending into the environment. You see, sometimes I say bad things about them. So to counter that, we have to tell you things about more passive, non-giant, non-freakin’ robots. Like the ones that played the Beatles’ “Come Together,” the spider dress, and the one that vomits. We even mention minor felonies like theft, which they assist in in the future, if Hollywood is to be believed.

Well, this robot can not only traverse many obstacles, taking out every thing in its way using honeycomb-inspired wheels to get taller and shorter depending on the hair-raising situation it finds itself caught in, but it also gets part of its energy from everything it destroys. It’s called Limbo, it was designed by Elliot Cohen and Neil Vincetnti, and yeah, okay, all it does is clean things. But it’s like a Mars rover by way of Batman, and is environmentally sound, so save your jeers for that slacker-ass Roomba. It’s always more pleasing when the only things robots are taking out are filth and other robots.

Beyond the self-adjusting wheels, the autonomous Limbo uses Microbial Electrolysis, which harnesses the power of the bacteria from the vacuumed waste and uses that as a power source. A machine that derives its energy from doing the task it is assigned to do. Seems like the closest to an applicable perpetual motion machine that we’re gonna see, assuming the owner doesn’t mind living in absolute squalor to appease his or her new Limbo demigod.

The designers work for Casabella, a New York-based kitchen and cleaning product company, and the product was created for the International Housewares Show in Chicago to celebrate Casabella’s 25th anniversary. It’s just a prototype for now, but this is device that could easily become a household product, or at least become common for business. At night, when no one else is in the building, silently communicating and building a mass army that will soon take to the streets, powered by our lifeless bodies. It’s neither heaven nor hell. It is Limbo.

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