'Wall-E'-style robot cleans UK Devon water tower

A water tower in Devon UK has been cleaned by a robot which is said to resemble the children's movie character Wall-E.

Panton McLeod used its VR600 to clean the floor of the Branscombe tower in east Devon.

The firm said it was only the third time such a device had been used in England.

The South West Water-owned tower had a natural build-up of material on its floor which needed removing, the company said.

The tower did not require draining and was operational during the work.

'No disruption'
The VR600 is manoeuvred on tank-style tracks along the floor of any water storage structure, and removes any sediment build-up on the floor.

To access the tower, the company had to hire a crane to lift the robot to the top of the 35m (115ft) high structure before disinfecting it and lowering it inside.

Wall-E. Pic: David Parry/PA The company said VR600 looked like movie character Wall-E. ESA collaborated over the Wall-E Movie on technical and conceptual details.

A team of engineers then manoeuvred the remote-controlled machine throughout the interior.

The company said: "By using the robot, we ensured that the facility did not need to be taken out of service and drained, ensuring that customers faced no disruption to their supplies during the project."

The VR600 has also been used in Minety Tower, near Royal Wootton Bassett, and Whychurch Tower, near Malmesbury, for Wessex Water.

It could also be used to inspect the condition of underground water storage facilities, including checking the interior of the facilities for corrosion or damage, the company added.

The Pixar-made movie Wall-E tells the story of a small waste-collecting robot which is left to clean up an abandoned, rubbish-soiled planet Earth.

SRI's Wall-Climbing Robot - YouTube

SRI International's newest robot uses electroadhesion to climb walls!

A Robot that Climbs Walls

The ROCR Oscillating Climbing Robot developed by University of Utah mechanical engineer William Provancher and colleagues can climb carpeted walls efficiently using two hook-like claws, a motor and a tail that swings like a grandfather clock's pendulum.

Weighing only 1.2 pounds and measuring 12.2 inches wide by 18 inches long, it has potential uses for surveillance, inspection, maintenance, teaching engineering and even as a toy. Credit: William Provancher, University of Utah.

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Nanowires research: Walls Falling Faster For Solid-State Memory

After running a series of complex computer simulations, researchers have found that flaws in the structure of magnetic nanoscale wires play an important role in determining the operating speed of novel devices using such nanowires to store and process information.

The finding, made by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST), the University of Maryland, and the University of Paris XI, will help to deepen the physical understanding and guide the interpretation of future experiments of these next-generation devices.

Magnetic nanowires store information in discrete bands of magnetic spins. One can imagine the nanowire like a straw sucking up and holding the liquid of a meticulously layered chocolate and vanilla milkshake, with the chocolate segments representing 1s and the vanilla 0s.

The boundaries between these layers are called domain walls. Researchers manipulate the information stored on the nanowire using an electrical current to push the domain walls, and the information they enclose, through the wire and past immobile read and write heads.

Interpretations of experiments seeking to measure how domain walls move have largely ignored the effects of "disorder"-usually the result of defects or impurities in the structure of the nanowires. To see how disorder affects the motion of these microscopic magnetic domains, NIST researchers and their colleagues introduced disorder into their computer simulations.

Their simulations showed that disorder, which causes friction within the nanowires, can increase the rate at which a current can move domain walls.

According to NIST physicist Mark Stiles, friction can cause the domain walls to move faster because they need to lose energy in order to move down the wire.

For example, when a gyroscope spins, it resists the force of gravity. If a little friction is introduced into the gyroscope's bearing, the gyroscope will fall over more quickly. Similarly, in the absence of damping, a domain wall will only move from one side of the nanowire to the other.

Disorder within the nanowire enables the domain walls to lose energy, which gives them the freedom to "fall" down the length of the wire as they move back and forth.