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.

Jaffe is already building several prototypes for the AUE, including five or six of the soccer-ball sized ‘motherships’ and about 20 of a smaller version (the mini-AUE). The smaller and larger drones will be able to communicate via acoustic signals. A single mothership AUE could be moored while talking to free floating AUEs and mini-AUEs. The larger drones may have GPS trackers, while the smaller would not. This sort of network would allow Jaffe to measure ocean drift.

Other researchers have built buoyant drones before, some even more sophisticated. Yet none have taken measurements over the distance or period of time that Jaffe’s will. By dispersing a swarm of AUEs and mini-AUEs, Jaffe’s team could get a unique spatial and temporal understanding of the ocean.

Here's a better look at what's going on inside the AUE.

The following video is a presentation Jaffe gave explaining his AUE project. It’s a bit long and may not appeal to those unaccustomed to listening to scientific lectures. You can skip to 26:30 to hear Jaffe introduce the AUE device. He describes the mini-AUE (and shows a prototype) around 31:15. If you stick around to 38:25 and 47:30 he’ll tell you about the use of AUEs to locate plane crashes, and how building a mini-AUE might become a great project for middle school and high school students.

As Jaffe briefly described in the video, the AUEs could be modified with different kinds of instrumentation. They may measure salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, chlorophyll levels, or turbidity of water. Each of these variables has a significant effect on ocean life. Taken collectively they could give a detailed account of marine habitats, helping governments decide if protected areas of the ocean are thriving.

But there’s really no limit to what these drones could learn. Biological info on marine habitats, meteorological on currents, seismological measurements on underwater earthquakes…the list goes on. Which is probably why the NSF has given Jaffe and his colleagues another $1.5 million to help with the control mechanisms for the movement of the AUEs. Each little drone is just a ball bobbing along under the water’s surface. As a collective they could be a vast net to catch all the secrets of the ocean. Maybe they’ll finally be able to tell me where the monster from Cloverfield came from.

[photo credit: Jaffe Lab, UCSD]
[video credit: UCTV]

University of California San Diego is organizing a collectively-created visual model of the mouse brain. Open up, Mickey, it's time to see what's inside.

It may sound like the premise for the next roller coaster ride at Disney Land, but UC San Diego is serious about letting you take a virtual voyage through the brain of a mouse. Their new open source resource, called the Whole Brain Catalog, allows scientists to navigate through a visual model of a mouse brain. Not only that, but each research team can also upload their latest results helping to improve the accuracy of the WBC overtime. UCSD hopes that their new creation will prove to be a valuable utility for scientists all over the world. Watch a brief demo of the catalog in the video after the break.

Much like MIT’s Registry for Standard Biological Parts, or even Google Earth, the Whole Brain Catalog hopes to build off of collective knowledge. Individual research groups contributing to a central repository of information is going to change the way the scientific community works. In the short term, teams around the world will have access to a visual model of the brain that is used most often in their labs. In the long term, the success of WBC could help usher in a new era of the rapid exchange of scientific information. The quicker that researchers can share their results, the faster other teams can benefit from them, and the sooner we will all enjoy the technological innovations they create.

The video tour you just watched is a cool visual trek, but it doesn’t really highlight all of the capabilities that the Whole Brain Catalog will contain. Yes, the resource will be multi-scale, letting you explore the brain as a whole, or in components right down to the subcellular level. Just as importantly though, it will be open source, and downloadable – giving researchers easy access and a chance to edit its contents. Those contents will be searchable, so that you can type in “hypothalamus” and jump straight to that portion of the mouse brain.

Rather amazingly, the WBC will be at such high resolution that it will be able to simulate neural connections. By building off the scientific results of various teams around the world, these simulations could help form a highly accurate model of a functioning mammalian brain. No small feat.

The WBC shares some ultimate goals of human brain simulators like the Blue Brain Project. Mouse brains, however, offer some unique advantages. They are simpler, more easily explored, and researchers in many countries have a shared standard by which they are examined and discussed. Eventually, the information included in the Whole Brain Catalog could make it a unique resource for neurological studies, made all the more special and powerful by its open source nature. It’s much too early to tell if UC San Diego’s attempt will ultimately be successful, but I wish it luck. And if Disney wants to start on making an associated ride, I have some ideas already: 3D Neuron Laser Tag. It’ll be amazing, trust me.

[screen capture and video credit: Whole Brain Catalog]