No. 198: Robot for the purification of water quality (November 25, 2010)

NAC Corp. in Gifu Prefecture developed a robot to purify water quality in alliance with Wabot-House Laboratory of Waseda University and Gifu Pharmaceutical University. The company combined its ultrafine froth generation equipment with the underwater exploration robot of Wabot-House Laboratory. The robot looks into the underwater of a pond and lake, locates dysoxic areas, and oxygenizes them effectively, whereby it activates the activities of aerobic microbes to purify water quality. Gifu Pharmaceutical University collected data in the experiments and verified the water quality, and a trial product was built. The company plans to sell this robot. It designs and builds a robot responding to the environment of the lake, pond, and river to be explored. The mounted sensor measures the underwater oxygen concentration around the robot. If the area is found to be a dysoxic area, the operator on the land remote-controls the robot to let the equipment on the robot generate ultrafine froths using air. Equipped with such apparatus as postural sensor, underwater camera, and sound navigation and ranging (sonar), and can move forward, dive, and emerge using four screws. The equipment developed by NAC sends compressed air of 0.1 MPa to the inside of the cylindrical special porous film. Compared with the conventional method to compress froths to ultrafine froths, NAC’s equipment can generate ultrafine froths even in the deep area inside water only by adjusting the pressure of air to send.