Swishing around the lake like an aquatic snake or eel, Envirobot is prototypical mobile water inspector that can deliver real-time temperature, conductivity, and contamination readings through its motorized segmented body, which measures 1.5 meters (about five feet) long.

Switzerland's Lake Geneva has attracted many notable figures to its shores over the centuries, from Mary Shelley to Freddie Mercury. But its newest illustrious resident, a pollutant-sniffing robot eel named Envirobot, is in a class all its own.

The eelbot is part of the Nano-Tera Program, a Swiss governmental initiative intended to stimulate nanotechnological innovations, and involves researchers from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, the University of Lausanne, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. The prototype has already been deployed for several test swims.

Video: École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne/YouTube

"The goal of the project is to measure pollution directly in the lake," said Jan Roelof van der Meer, Envirobot project coordinator and the department head of fundamental microbiology at the University of Lausanne, in the above video.

Naturally, van der Meer and his colleagues cannot dump a bunch of toxic waste into Lake Geneva to hash out the robot's capabilities, but they did treat a small area of the lake with salt, and successfully taught Envirobot how to detect resulting shifts in water conductivity.

Each module linked into the robot's serpentine frame contains different sensors or experiments, and its length can be easily shortened or extended depending on its mission parameters.

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