The burrowing bot, know as the RoboClam, is about half the size of a lighter but is controlled by an off board set of apparatuses, including pressure regulators, pistons and other control mechanisms.
As part of their research the MIT team, led by Dr. Anette Hosoi, began investigating their new anchor by observing how razor clams dig. Peering through a glass box filled with sand and salt water, Hosoi and her team were startled to find that the razor clam’s movements actually alter the physical properties of its surrounding medium in order to dig faster.
In order to burrow, the razor clam slams its flexible foot into the sandy ocean floor. Once anchored, the foot begins to thrash back and forth, pushing itself further into the sandy surface and dragging its shell behind. Once the shell enters the sand it too gets involved in the digging, opening and closing in quick succession, turning waterlogged sand into a much more malleable quicksand solution.
In fact, according to Amos Winter, a grad student working on the RoboClam project, without altering the physical properties of the packed sand the razor clam would be a hopeless burrower. " [M] oving through a fluidized substrate [the quicksand] rather than a packed granular medium [ordinary sand] drastically reduces the drag force on the clam's body, bringing it to a point within the animal's strength capabilities.”
According to Hosoi and Winter, in the future a larger RoboClam could be used as a smarter, more reliable anchor for ships, buoys and any number of static aquatic sensors. The RoboClam could also be used to rid the ocean of buried, underwater mines, digging down to detonate those unwanted remnants of past conflicts.
Beyond those two scenarios, there is also the idea that the RoboClam could be used to develop subsea infrastructure, planting fiber optic cable along the seafloor with little or no need for human supervision.
Image Courtesy of MIT