Servo - September 2016

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