SERVO 09.2016 9
Subterranean Poobot in
Operation
With any luck at all, you’ll never
actually encounter Luigi — developed
at MIT’s Senseable City Lab
( senseable.mit.edu). Much like his
Mario Bros. namesake, Luigi is
designed to operate in city sewers,
and his job is to collect and analyze
sewage. (Luigi is a next-generation
version of his predecessor, Mario.)
You see, every time you flush,
you are sending out samples that tell
stories about your life: the kind of
foods you eat, diseases you might
have, drugs that you are taking,
bacteria that live in you, and so on.
Luigi’s task is to examine
subterranean excrements in the hope
that the information gathered will
help urban officials prevent disease
outbreaks, analyze the public’s
antibiotic resistance levels, and
otherwise make cities healthier places
to live. As noted by one researcher, “I
can tell much more about someone
So far, Luigi has only been in
operation in Boston and Cambridge
in a project called “Underworlds,”
but other cities are likely to join in. In
fact, the project team recently was
awarded a $4 million grant to extend
the program to Kuwait City. A rep
also stated, “To me, it is hard to
imagine that in 10 or 15 years, every
city is not going to have a pretty
sophisticated, much bigger-scale
sewage monitoring program than
even what we are building here.”
Oh, in case you are wondering,
Luigi is capable of cleaning himself
up by pumping a bleach solution
through his system. Good idea. SV
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Setting Ideas Into Motion
The Senseable City Lab sewer bot, Luigi.