Gasbot Sniffs Out Climate Destruction With Lasers

obs don’t get much more dirty than being the person who has to hike around landfills looking for sources of stinkyness. It’s an important job, though, because stinkyness means methane, and methane means you’re killing the planet. Yes, you. But seriously, figuring out where landfills are leaking is a critical and tedious and decidedly unpleasant thing, and you know what thatmeans: bring on the robots!

Gasbot is a project from the AASS Research Centre at Orebro University in Sweden. It’s a Clearpath Robotics Husky A200 mobile robot (awarded for free through Clearpath’s Partner Program) equipped with a pair of laser scanners, a GPS, and a remote gas sensor. Specifically, we’re talking about a Tunable Laser (LASER!) Absorption Spectrometer, which provides integral concentration measurements of gasses over the path of the laser beam. All you have to do is let Gasbot roam around a site where you think you might have gas leaks, and it will build up a map of concentrations and locations for you, while you see how many scented candles it takes to numb your olfactory centers. [Read More]