MIT Invents a Swarm of Sea-Skimming, Oil-Collecting Robots

Earlier this week, DISCOVER brought you oil-cleaning bacteria. Today, we bring you oil-cleaning bots. This weekend in watery Venice, Italy, MIT scientists will demonstrate a creation called Seaswarm, a fleet of autonomous swimming bots intended to skim the water's surface; each bot would drag a sort of mesh net to collect the crude sitting there. According to their creators, the machines will be able to find oil on their own and talk to one another to compute the most efficient way to tidy it up.