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A great way to attract attention (and hopefully, success) for yourself as an entrepreneur is to cling to what happens to be at the forefront of technology at that particular time. Drones? Sure. Blockchain? You bet. The Internet of Things? Frankly, you'd be stupid not to do it. But even if this behavior is a standard practice, a few buzzword bingo cards are as complete as that of a new Russian project involving a solar-powered drone boat that takes intelligent sensor readings and saves them in the blockchain.
To be honest, the so-called "Drone on the Volga" project really promises to do good. The work of the Airalab and Smart IoT Distributions companies, the drone boat, leads to continuous water readings in the Kuybyshev basin, the largest reservoir of Eurasia, located in the Volga river. These data are then made available through the Ethereum blockchain, along with parameters like exactly where the drone boat was at the time the readings were taken.
By analyzing the data, third-party companies can then work to find the source of pollution – hopefully doing something about it. Since Russia holds about a fifth of the fresh waters of the world, this is a mission that should interest everyone.
"Imagine hundreds of such robots floating autonomously on a river without the need for human support," said Alisher Khassanov, chief engineer at Airalab, at Digital Trends. "Obviously, to make this happen, they need an autonomous energy source, these are photovoltaic solar panels, which could be a source of a continuous flow of river pollution data, protected by the blockchain".
This is not the first time that we have written about robot projects that aim to independently take water readings to help fight pollution. One of the most interesting of these is the flock of robotic swans that patrol the artificial reservoirs of Singapore, taking water quality measures as they do. These data are made available in real time via cloud to the experts of water management agencies, which can therefore ensure that water quality problems are addressed quickly.
It is hoped that as the dream of intelligent cities takes hold, projects like this will only become more common. After all, if there's one thing we can not really do without, it's clean water.
