Release the drones! Jules Jaffe from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institute just received $1 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to build a fleet of drones to explore the ocean. The Autonomous Underwater Explorers (AUE) could help track everything from tsunamis to squid spawn. Looking like miniature Death Stars, the soccer ball sized AUEs will be able to control their buoyancy as they are carried by currents to help researchers map the ocean’s behavior at different levels. Once deployed, the AUE program could help determine the efficacy of protected marine habitats, retrieve the black box from a crashed plane, or track an oil spill.
The underwater drone swarm will eventually help researchers at UC San Diego explore the ocean (left). Right now, there are only five or six of the prototypes (right).
While the AUEs aren’t exactly articulated machines, they have many of the features and benefits of swarm robotics. As with many swarm robots, their strength is in numbers, and communication between individual bots. A solitary drone could only tell researchers about the conditions in its immediate vicinity. A fleet of drones will be able to describe their relative movement and the variations in ocean activity. It’s a cool concept that has great scalability. Right now Jaffe is planning on hundreds of drones, but imagine what we could learn with thousands or millions. The ocean is the last great frontier on Earth and these unmanned devices may be our best way of exploring it.
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