Recently some UK researchers have been working on developing a new sort of power source, one that we are all familiar with. They have developed a robot dubbed the Ecobot III that actually "eats" food and digests it and uses that energy converted from that to power itself. The way it works is by putting partially processed sewage into the robots digester. Bacteria within the digester breaks down the food and produces hydrogen electrons that are used in a fuel cells to create an electrical current that is then used to power the robot. Another interesting thing is that the robot can do is autonomously navigate to a nutrient rich feeding tube. Then once its done with the food, it excretes it in a similar way to how we do it (when were sick).
Currently there is a major downside to this technology. While it is working and an amazing technology with incredible potential, it is incredibly inefficient at the time. At the moment it is only able to produce 1% of usable energy for the robot. Eventually they will be able make the machine a bit more efficient and maybe allow for a robot to run exclusively on food that the robot ingests.
There is incredible potential behind this technology. This could be the new alternative energy source that houses run off of, or the new Mr. Fusion that allows us to power our time traveling De-Lorean when we don't have any lighting strikes to provide the 1.21 jigawatts to get it back to 1988. On a more sinister note, this could also allow for hyper intelligent autonomous robots to become more mobile. We have managed to create robots that learn and we have robots with incredibly realistic expressions. At this point we don't have to worry, but if all these technologies are perfected and combined, we may have a problem on our hands.
