Robotic Spiders to Remediate Contaminated or Abandoned Land

Do you have a plot of land contaminated with toxic waste, dry soil, or abandoned? It's time to solve that problem with Terra Spider, the robotic spiders that clean up contaminated or abandoned land.

Inspired by current agriculture and soil remediation practices, a group of students from the Architecture program at California College of the Arts (United States) designed and built Terra Spider, the robotic spider that cleans contaminated or abandoned land. The students designed and assembled an octopedal laser-cut chassis, a powered drilling mechanism, and a liquid deployment system, all easily accessible components. The current progress shown in the video below demonstrates the principle of deploying several eight-legged drones that can drill and deploy a liquid load, intended to "repair or maintain" contaminated soil.

Although project details are scarce, by programming each robot to understand the conditions of a given location, and equipping it with tools to remove and place bio-matter, Terra Spider begins its work, devising patterns and cleaning the soil most suitable for addressing the terrain of the specific site. As a performance piece, each Terra Spider is capable of revealing a pattern currently hidden beneath the soil surface. In this state, the robot can drill through materials and place them along a path.

The movements of Terra Spider are powered by servos, a Sparkfun geared motor enables drilling, and a peristaltic pump handles the load deployment. It can also be manually controlled via a Wi-Fi network or a GPS system. This project is still a work in progress, but the idea behind this first prototype is to turn it into a larger and more complex robot that can be used on contaminated or barren landscapes. Hopefully they will succeed.