| 25 August 2010

Images via SENSEableCity MIT's Sensable City Lab directo Carlo Ratti and associate director Assaf Biderman have come up with the SeaSwarm, a robot that uses nanofibers to absorb 20 times its weight in oil, and their hope is that it can be developed into a viable solution for cleaning up the Gulf oil disaster. The 7-foot-wide robots sport at 16-foot-long conveyor belt of paper-like nanofibers that absorb the oil, and are rotated through the machine where the oil is cleaned off. Skimming the surface of the water and powered by sunlight, the robot can continually collect oil. They estimate that ... Read the full story on TreeHugger