There have been a number of oil spills in the last few years including the one in Mumbai ocean this year. But the most severe such accidents took place in Mexico last year when the Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, injuring 17 others and triggering what is generally recognized as one of the greatest human errors ever made. And by the time, the leak could be capped, around 4.9 million barrels of oil covered the Gulf making it a toxic slick.
After each such tragedies, it becomes a real pain in their head to recover the ocean and the aquatic eco-system from the spreading toxic fluid. Cleaning this up manually with workers is not only less efficient but also risky for worker's life.
Cesar Harada, then studying in MIT Boston visited the tragic site at Gulf of Mexico and decided to leave the college in order to develop an open source oil spill cleaning robot called Protei. Our current available oil spill skimming technologies are only able to collect three percent of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico and carry health risks to humans and heavy economic costs. Whereas, Protei, the unmanned autonomous relatively inexpensive and open hardware, will be a far more potential and powerful weapon in the battle to clean up oil spills while preserving the safety of the workers who would otherwise be exposed to the toxic mess. The other usage of this sailboat drone may also be oceanography and surveillance.
No comments:
Post a Comment