Today we’re doing a bit of follow up to yesterday’s post, featuring Pier Pressure, the fantastic, re-imagined supermarket ride by Banksy. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is said to have leaked 4.9 million barrels of crude oil. While the leak is now capped, the clean-up is still ongoing. Researchers in MIT’s Senseable City Project developed Seaswarm, an autonomous network of solar-powered oil cleaning robots to handle situations just like this. The small floating devices, skim the water’s surface, collecting oil on a conveyor belt made of a thin nanowire mesh. This patented nanomaterial can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil. The oil is then digested onboard the seaswarm so that the robot can be continually collecting. The devices communicate with each other through GPS and wifi tackling an oil spill from the edge and working inwards. Their small size allows them to reach areas where other oil collectors cannot navigate.