Sony may have their Aibo dogs and Boston Dynamics may have their backflipping metal humanoids, but us, we’ve got… robot swans.
Five of them, even. The graceful floating automatons are the brainchild of the Public Utilities Board (PUB), the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Environmental Research Institute, and the Tropical Marine Science Institute. Dubbed the Smart Water Assessment Network (SWAN), they’re designed to resemble real swans to blend in with nature, and they’ll be deployed at Marina, Punggol, Serangoon, Pandan, and Kranji reservoirs to collect data and monitor raw water quality.
Channel NewsAsia reported that the NUS team conceptualized the robot in 2010, but only started testing them out in 2014. Now, they’re ready to trawl water bodies and transmit data — such as pH and dissolved oxygen levels — wirelessly through cloud computing. The aim is to let them roam free autonomously, but the robots can be remotely controlled as well.
The team also made sure that the robots are durable to withstand hits with small boats and other vessels, though it’s unclear whether they’re tough enough to endure attacks by real life swans, a species known for aggressively defending their nests. Back in 2012, an Illinois man drowned after a swan charged and capsized his boat before preventing him from swimming to shore.
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