Self-driving cars are already part of the future the car industry is looking towards to and while to be fair there is a lot of progress made so far towards that target, we are yet to see a fully self-driven car hit the market (not for lack of trying, of course). Tesla is one of the companies that is pioneering the self-driving car technology and with all its resources, the American car maker is about to deal with its first competitor. There is one resourceful thinker who has gone through the trouble of building a potato robot for the future that can drive itself autonomously. It can also charge its own battery without any intervention.
It’s simply a quick mini vehicle that is everything Tesla wants to build except the fact that maybe it’s really not a car in the conventional sense. The technology that is driving the potato robot is pretty much aligned to the technology used in self-driving cars. Marek Baczynski built the robot using a pair of electrodes that are designed to generate power for the mini car. There is an energy harvesting chip attached to the robot, in addition to a supercapacitor attached on the potato.
So, how does it work? It’s actually simple. The supercapacitor connected to the potato and the energy harvesting chip generate and store the electrochemical energy respectively. The mini car will move once the energy stored hits a certain voltage. The developer says that it takes just 15 minutes for the robot to charge and start moving. The challenge is that the energy produced during this time can only move the robot about 8 centimeters. There are many people who would argue and say that that’s not nearly enough to go anywhere but it is a potato robot, not some car you’d use to get to the mall. The average distance per day the robot can go is just 7 and a half meters. However, the most interesting part about all this is not just the energy economy but the self-driving feature.
Marek decided to install a small miniature control board that allows the robot to decide on its own in which direction it will move once it’s fully charged and ready to go. The potato can last quite some time but eventually it will run out of its electrical capacity. Although there is a tip for ensuring that it doesn’t go to waste and that will be provided at the tail end of the video. In any case though, what this recreational inventor has built here is a simple robot which says a lot about how future transport will look. Although Marek may not have any intention of commercially producing the self-driving potato robot, there are other bigger more resourceful companies like Tesla that are pouring money towards research and development of self-driven machines. Whether this will become a reality or not is no longer a question of if but when.
