With the recent earthquake in Haiti, the importance of earthquake detectors has been highlighted again. Now a group of students from the JT Engineering College in Gujarat, India, have come up with a robot that can sense earthquakes, and it apparently does so a good three hours before the earthquake. Of course, three hours isn’t a lot of time, but when you’re talking about a natural disaster, three hours will certainly save a lot of lives. This robot has two transmitters whose circuits are kept inside the earth to sense changes in temperature and water levels, as well as transmit the information about the changes via microwave frequencies. It uses microcontrollers to sense vibrations and will give off an alarm upon detection. Of course, the question remains why this device needed to be built into a robot form factor, but robots are cool, so nobody’s going to complain, right? Check out a video of it if you’re into robots.
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