The Gowanus Canal has been described as a forgotten relic of Brooklyn’s industrial past, where it certainly is in an extremely sad state by virtue of being a garbage-choked waterway that holds nothing but toxic waste in there. Heck, it even starts to make me wonder whether we will soon see turtles with ninja fighting skills make the headlines. Full of mercury, lead, raw sewage, cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other pollutants, there might be hope for the Gowanus Canal just yet, thanks to a robot which so happens to be part of the Brooklyn Atlantis project that was spearheaded by Oded Nov, an assistant professor over at the department of technology management and innovation at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.
This particular aquatic robotic vehicle (ARV) goes about collecting environmental data on the Gowanus Canal, where it picks up water-quality data including (but not limited to) temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen and others, while carrying a couple of cameras where one of them is underwater, with the other above, and both will be used in tandem to record conditions at the canal.
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