For wings that clean our water
CHENNAI: With all the news surrounding cleaning up the River Ganga and staving off water pollution, without a doubt the brains of the future will have a role to play in it. While the noble effort to clean up our rivers is a project in the long run, the students of IIT-Madras, Kanpur and Roorkee came together recently for a workshop to design robots that can manoeuvre underwater and measure the properties of water bodies to help measure their pollution levels.
Dubbed ‘Nanins’, these plane-shaped robots are designed at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and can go deep underwater to collect water quality data with minimal energy use. “Each robot has a different sensor, and they measure different properties of the water and hence water pollution, like dissolved oxygen levels, conductivity, pH and temperature, and the idea is that if you have a robot that is really efficient, it can go hundreds of kilometres with very little energy use,” said Raghav Khanna, doctoral student at ETH Zurich and one of the facilitators of the workshop. “You can put it into a river or lake, and it can travel the entire length. Most of the focus is on control, how to control it underwater, wing physics, from scratch.”
The students were encouraged to design and build the wings and certain components of the robot themselves. “Most of the focus is on controlling the robots. Working with underwater robots is actually less dangerous that flying ones because they cannot crash to the ground!” added Raghav.
“We are essentially gliding underwater, since it is the most energy efficient way to move underwater,” said Stefan Bertschi, who leads the robotics programme at ETH Zurich. “ This workshop is more of like a Proof of Concept (PoF) of the robots. The students developed the wings and some parts were 3D printed. We can control pitch and also the depth and get the best possible gliding angle. It’s not too dangerous to do it under water. With flying robots, if you crash, then you have to rebuild it!”
High level application of these robots include their use in mapping water bodies hundreds of kilometres wide with detailed measurements of their pollution levels.The programme was organized by Swissnex India, Consulate General of Switzerland, as an outreach initiative.