As a part of a competition for the robotics team at the University of Surrey in 2022, students were tasked to create a design for a robot inspired by animals that could benefit society and the environment. Nearly 100 submissions were sent and reviewed by people who were passionate and interested creating something that could help people and the world. Dr. Robert Siddall, an aerospace engineer, commented how there were so many interesting designs and concepts created by so many people, but ultimately chose one design created by Elanor Mackintosh. “We chose Eleanor’s both because we really liked the idea and the way it used bio inspiration, but also because cleaning up ocean plastic was the most common purpose among all the entries we received, so we thought our winner should reflect that,” Siddall told FOX Weather.
Mackintosh chose to make her robot based off of a fish because she wanted it to reflect the efforts done to rid the world of plastics in the ocean. “I decided to base the design on a fish and focus on the properties of gills specifically since fish use their gills to filter oxygen into their blood,” she said. The robot would then be named Gilbert, a pun of a fish’s gills. It contains motors on the fins and tail for precise movement and a wire network that allows for remote controlled movement via controller. The actual vacuum section of the robot lies within its mouth. It fills with water which then forces the mouth to close and the gills open as the water is forced into it. The gills are attacked to fine layers of mesh that catch the microplastics and sucks them into Gilbert’s body.
Mackintosh has stated her wishes to further advance Gilbert and make it an anatomically correct model of a fish. She is currently working with another robots research project in order to further progress her development of Gilbert.
