News 2001

December 2001

Slug-eating robot wins top accolade, Evening Gazette
A SLUG-eating robot invented by a computer scientist from the University has been voted one of the best inventions of 2001.

Slug diet keeps robot on the go, East Anglian Daily Times
A SLUG-eating robot invented by a computer scientist from the University has been voted one of the best inventions of 2001.

Essex is tops for research, East Anglian Daily Times
Essex has broken through into the top 10 research universities in the UK according to national figures issued today.

Slugs watch out, there's a robot about! Essex County Standard
A slug-eating robot invented by a computer scientist at the University has been voted one of the best inventions of the year.

Acclaim for Essex experts
A slug-eating robot invented by a computer scientist from the University of Essex has been voted one of the best inventions of 2001 by Time magazine.

Slugbot was designed to be the world's first robotic predator, living free on agricultural land, catching slugs and fermenting their bodies to power itself with biogas.

It was invented by senior lecturer Owen Holland, when he was working at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. He moved to Essex this year via the California Institute of Technology.

Owen said: 'It sounds like a crazy project, but had a very serious undercurrent. At the moment, the usefulness of robots is limited because they always need to be near a source of electricity. Organisations like the US military have recently become interested in the idea of building equipment that can get its own power directly from the environment - they call this "energy harvesting". The Slugbot was the first attempt to build a 'wild' robot that could live off the land like a predator without the need for human intervention.'

The initial idea had been to create a robot that lived in sewers and fed on rats. However, after working with a leading West Country agricultural college, Owen chose to work with slugs as they were slow, plentiful, and reasonably digestible. But even robots will one day have a vegetarian option. Researchers at the Gastrobotics Institute in Florida are working on robots powered by carrots and oranges.

Work continues at UWE at Bristol, where researcher Chris Melhuish is developing a new model, called the Ecobot.

At Essex, Owen is now working on a project to build an intelligent robot that has feelings as well as thoughts.