The Gowanus canal, located within the greatest borough within New York city known as Brooklyn and bordering Red Hook and South Brooklyn on the west and Park Slope to the east, is only 1.8 miles long but it is highlighted for being one of the most polluted bodies of water in the entire country. As someone who lives close by this body of water, it is truly disgusting to see the amount of items that will float by you within a few minutes, not to mention that it is filled with lead, mercury and sewage.
Needless to say, it has long been obvious to Brooklynites that something needs to be done to clean up this mess. And that is exactly the thought process behind a new remote-controlled robot that NYU Polytechnic has unleashed to collect key data in discover what is actually in the water besides the contaminants we already know about. You can’t fully cleanse something if you don’t exactly what lies beneath the surface, right? Coined the Brooklyn Atlantis, this robotic innovation can store important information in relation to temperature, salinity, oxygen, and even pH levels. Also, it powers multiple cameras that are located both above and below the water in order for help residents learn what is going on underwater.
This isn’t the first robot of its kind to possess the functionality needed to work successfully within a wet environment, yet the Brooklyn Atlantis stands apart from others because it involves participation from nearly 600 volunteers who will be assisting in analyzing the data collected, as well as tagging photos being taken.
"The main advantage of using an unmanned vehicle in our project is making it easier for anyone, anywhere, to access the data and contribute," said Assistant Professor Oded Nov, one of the main leaders in the gathering of the Gowanus-related information, in a statement. "It enables us to bring many human eyes and brains to an area that’s not accessible to them in any other way."
Nov added, "It is easy to take a sample of water quality and analyze it. But to quantify something like wildlife presence, over time, and in different locations, we use a cost-effective approach in combination with our robot’s capabilities."
For those of you out there interested in how robots are actually helping to enhance our quality of life, from being able to fetch us a cold brew from the fridge to significantly improving conditions within our environment, this cleanup plan for the canal sounds greats on paper, but I am more interested what the next steps will be after this data is closely analyzed. Until then, I guess we will have to wait and see how beneficial this robot actually is and of course, avoid this body of water like the plague.
