Schools of Robot Fish Will Soon Infest the Seas

Michael Reilly — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:30:00 PDT

Robots can already mimic people, dogs, cats and insects. They can even walk on water. Now roboticists at the University of Washington have built a school of three robotic fish that swim and communicate wirelessly with one another using sonar signals. So far the fish are swimming happily in a laboratory tank, but researchers plan to build 20 of the aqua bots and unleash them in the Puget Sound next year to help track fish and whale migration, and contaminants in the water.

Robot fish have been around for a few years (pictured above in the London Aquarium, from 2005), but the UW invention is a milestone because it's the first group of robofish that can school through active communication. Biological fish form dazzling schools by communicating through their lateral lines and in a sense the bots do the same thing, only their communication is based on sonar. The fish are also equipped with 3-d compasses so they know where they are in the water, and pressure sensors to keep track of how deep they dive.

Admittedly they're not as sexy as their biological cousins, but videos of them swimming here show they make spooky stand-ins for the real thing.

Source: University of Washington via Discovery News

All The Nastiest Parts Of Pitch Black

charliejane — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:20:23 PST

Pitch Black, starring Vin Diesel, is a slow boil that gets awesome at the end. For the first hour and a half, our heroes are trapped on a mysterious planet that has like 5,000 suns, and then all the suns are eclipsed and it's permanent night. It takes a while to get to scenes like this one, where the foppish antique dealer ignites his own booze breath and discovers he's surrounded by spiky bat creatures. Then we watch the creatures dismember him and fight over his corpse, thanks to Diesel's altered night vision. Two more bizarre Pitch clips, after the jump.

The other two insane moments in Pitch: Vin Diesel's drug-addicted parole officer gets impaled and then decapitated by one of the monsters. And then Diesel gets so pissed off he wrestles one of the monsters. He's so angry, his head gets weirdly distorted and elongated. You can see his fury through the monster's weird ghost vision. He punches the monster so hard its organs come flying out. Go Vin. Why is he not the most famous action movie star in America?

io9: sonar

Schools of Robot Fish Will Soon Infest the Seas

All The Nastiest Parts Of Pitch Black