“More than 1.6 million tonnes of unexploded weapons litter the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Remote-controlled seabed crawlers and robots with ‘smart grabbers’ are now cleaning up these toxic munitions,” reports the BBC:
A boxy robot crawls across the seabed off northern Germany, reaches through the murky water with a metal claw, and picks up its target: a rusting grenade, dumped into the sea after World War Two. Overhead, another robot swims along the surface, scanning the seabed for more munitions. More robot claws reach into the water from above, plucking bombs and mines from the sediment.
A pilot project backed by the German government will be deploying these and other technologies in a bay in the Baltic Sea this summer, to test a fast, industrial-scale process for clearing dumped munitions that are polluting the North and Baltic Seas. The project is part of a wider $106.9 million program by the German government that aims to develop a way to safely remove and destroy munitions littering the German parts of the North and Baltic Seas – a toxic legacy that amounts to an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of dumped explosives and weapons….
“These munitions are rusting, and our research has shown that over time, they’re releasing more and more carcinogenic [and other toxic] substances, traces of which have been found in fish and mussels,” Jens Greinert says. “The longer we wait, the more they’re going to rust, and the concentration of harmful substances in the water is going to rise. So now is the moment to figure out what to do with this stuff, while the munitions are still intact enough to be grabbed.” Based on the scientific findings regarding the rusting, leaking munitions, Germany decided it was time to try and remove it from the sea at scale….
Children and beachcombers have occasionally picked up seemingly innocent rocks that turned out to be explosives, or pieces of Baltic amber that turned out to be washed-up white phosphorus from incendiary bombs – which can spontaneously burst into flames when warmed, for example in a human hand, or trouser pocket. Walkers, divers and fishing crews in Europe also continue to find old wartime munitions, with hundreds of encounters recorded by the Ospar Commission, a monitoring body, every year. Unexploded ordnance can also get in the way of infrastructure projects, including Europe’s massive offshore wind farm expansions.
Robots are increasingly being used in other areas as well, such as restaurant food preparation. In California, the minimum wage for fast-food workers was recently raised to $20 per hour, which led to a loss of about 10,000 jobs and the scheduled elimination of another 1,300 jobs. “El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will speed up the use of robotics, including robots that make salsa and cook fried foods,” reported the Hoover Institution. The Sweetgreen restaurant chain is using a salad-making robot.
Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells to repair damaged cells. Nanorobots are also being used to fight cancer. “In a major advancement in nanomedicine, Arizona State University scientists…have successfully programmed nanorobots to shrink tumors by cutting off their blood supply.”
Last year, doctors used a surgical robot to carry out incredibly complicated spinal surgery. They also did the first robotic liver transplant in America.
Robots with artificial intelligence are spreading on Japanese farms. In the U.S., farming robots now use artificial intelligence to kill 100,000 weeds per hour. Drones with artificial intelligence will make farming easier.
