When lobsters fight and when they flirt, they communicate by pissing in each other’s faces. They have little urine-release nozzles under their eyes, and they squirt urine at each other.

The urine is laced with various kinds of information. Scientists in Woods Hole, Massachusetts found out that when blindfolded, lobsters are able recognise each other as individuals based on these “odor signatures.”

Now, a lab at MIT is building underwater robots which are being used as AUVs, autonomous underwater vehicles. In the Iraq campaign, they served as mine sweepers.

They have minds of their own. They go out and do reconnaissance without instructions and come back and report in.

So the MIT scientists teamed up with the Woods Hole researchers to design a computer version of a lobster to test see how a lobster tracked odors in the water. They built a robot on wheels, about the size of a lobster and equipped with little detectors like a lobster nose.

The Pentagon is now funding Robo-Lobster research to the tune of millions of dollars in the hopes of developing an army of robotic undersea mine-sweepers that could be dropped from low-flying aircraft before a beachhead assault.

They would scurry around on the bottom and blow themselves up on command whenever they find a mine.

As observes Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters, “Hopefully these things won’t escape and start propagating in New England waters. Because it will make lobstermen’s jobs all that much more dangerous—hauling up self-destructing robotic-automaton lobsters in their traps.

These things now have legs, feelers, and everything. So God knows what’s in store for us in the robotic-lobster warfare department.”

From National Geographic < Robotics.
Also in Wired.