Robotic Nation Evidence

Robots may protect drinking water from terror attacks

From the article:

A network of underwater robots beaming up a near real-time environmental profile of lakes, rivers and reservoirs could soon be on the prowl helping safeguard the nation's drinking water from sabotage. The robots would replace researchers who painstakingly collect water samples in bottles and take them back to the laboratory for analysis, an expensive, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous practice.

By summer 2005, Syracuse University researchers will have installed a dozen robotic sensors to form the largest underwater monitoring system of its kind in the country and one of the most extensive in the world, said principal investigator Charles Driscoll, a professor of environmental systems engineering at Syracuse.

The title of the article is a little misleading -- the robots would detect problems rather than protect the water. But it is easy to imagine another set of robotic sentries encircling a lake to prevent anyone from entering the watershed.

One thing that this sort of system would help with is industrial pollution. For example, if a sewage pipeline breaks and starts dumping raw sewage into a watershed, or a factory starts dumping chemicals into a waterway, a system like this would detect the problem immediately.