The bad thing about technology is when some of it breaks, it breaks in a big way. Having huge oil tankers sink in oceans, for example, is never a good way to co-exist with nature. The good thing about technology is that it’s developing so fast that when a problem is discovered, there are thirty different futuristic solutions for it.
Which is where the OSP comes in. What is the OSP? The OSP is a robot that cleans up oil spills. It’s like a Roomba that eats black gold.
Using advanced robotics, the OSP is really a series of bots that work together autonomously to contain oil spills by surrounding them with inflatable barriers. Which, really, it isn’t so much to clean oil spills as much as it is a gadget to contain them so that cleaning crews can come in and do the rest.
Designed by Ji-Hoon Kim, the OSP unit is a simple-looking little robot that can be transported easily by plane or boat and, using multi-robot control algorithms, help us save some whales.
We’d like to point out that the OSP is not only a cute and useful little robot, it also has what may be the most dramatic tagline we’ve ever seen in a glorified robotic pentagon. The tagline is: Deploy. Unite. Siege.
Are we sure this is an oil-cleaning gadget and not our future overlord?
We’re not sure when the OSP will actually go into "combat" so to speak, but we like the idea and, really, anything that can help clean up the mess that is our environment we’re okay with. Now, where’s our ozone-fixing robot?
