R.I.P. Scout26
The team was doing the groundwork for an ambitious project that aims to understand the wellbeing of a city by tracking its residents’ biological and chemical waste. Eventually, with robotic samplers placed below the streets, Cambridge may have a “smart sewer” that will let public health officials study the city’s collective microbiome—the communities of microorganisms that live in humans’ guts. “The idea is to look at patterns of sewage relative to how we live our daily lives,” says Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, research director of the project. “We want this to be something that has actionable insights that enables public health in a meaningful way.”The project—dubbed Underworlds ....
That next level will be far more automated. Ratti and his team at the MIT SENSEable City Lab are currently designing manhole-width, foot-tall robots that will be suspended on cables to move up and down in the sewer lines. Using a custom-made smartphone app, the researchers will be able to control the robots remotely to collect samples and feed data into a detailed sewage sampling information system.
