The ABE (Autonomous Benthic Explorer) has used its on-board acoustic transponders and five thrusters to scan the seafloor for over 15 years - locating, mapping, and photographing hydrothermal vents, volcanoes, and other features of the great deep. Marked with "NCC1701" due to its resemblance to Captain Kirk's ship, ABE has performed more than 200 missions collecting valuable data for researchers worldwide. But something went wrong last Friday on an expedition off the coast of Chile and ABE just stopped - nothing was ever heard again. No word yet on whether ABE can be located or recovered.
That’s why the robot, which is equipped with sensors and laser beams for sorting out and allocating the six different types of plastics that can be reused, is so important. Human workers lack this ability, and this is where one can see how beneficial robots can really be. Digging through the trash may not sound like the most glamorous job ever, but someone has to do it if we are to get back on the right track.
The robot itself looks more like a storage box, which is sort of what it’s supposed to be. It has a garbage slot tray with a weight scale, a transfer basket and recycling box, and a main display at the front, which contains the lazar senses that identify the different types of plastic. It is actually quite large in size, measuring up to 5ft 6ins (1.7m) by 6ft 9ins (2.1m).
Initially, a smaller version of the robot is going to be tested out at stores in Osaka and Nara, and is being released by the manufacturing company IDEC Corp. If the trial proves successful, more robots like this will be sold and put to work all over Japan for around $US 55,000.
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Steven Hawking chimes in on the debate about whether to spend valuable resources sending humans on planetary exploration missions, or to use robots. After all, it's a lot cheaper to send a machine that doesn't need oxygen, isn't sensitive to radiation, and doesn't need to be returned to their family at the end of the mission. But there are some legitimate scientific reasons to send humans including real-time tweaking of the chemistry experiments looking for life, and to initiate unplanned tests based on unexpected observation. Also, the tax-paying public gets more emotionally invested in human missions and would possibly be more willing to continue funding. The ultimate answer is likely a mixture of the two, but exactly what that mixture will be is still being hotly debated.
