The Meat-Eaters - Domestic robots with a taste for flesh

Editor's note: Yes, they're real. These robots run on flies, mice, and other disgusting things. Right now they only supplement their power supply with vermin and pests, but they could eventually be self-sustaining. Just like your cat.

NewScientist - June 25, 2009, by Jessica Griggs

This robot catches flies to generate its own energy, click the link in the main text, left to see more of this robot and others with a taste for flesh (Image: Auger-Loizeau)

Futuristic-looking robots like Honda's sleek humanoid Asimo don't cut it for designer James Auger, at the Royal College of Art, London. Believing that they need to fit unobtrusively into the home, he has built robotic furniture. And, believing they need to be useful and entertaining, he has given the furniture an appetite for vermin, like mice and flies.

But the robots also have a taste for flesh. They can gain energy by chomping on flies and mice, an idea inspired by researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab, UK, who built a fly-powered robot and have also suggested that marine robots could feed on plankton.

Auger worked with long time collaborator and fellow designer Jimmy Loizeau to build the five domestic robots. Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.

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