AQUA2 amphibious robot is super cute and fast, less annoying than most pets because it has no head

The AQUA2, built at McGill University in Montreal, is the first of its kind. You see, the AQUA2 is a robot that can both dive and swim in water, and move about on land. The amphibious bot can explore water up to 120 feet and is tethered to a remote control via ethernet or fiber optics. The 'headless' robot's flippers make it a pretty impressive swimmer, and it's also strikingly fast on even rough terrain. Check out the video after the break.

[wopper Posted Jul 8th 2010 6:52PM]

Pretty awesome but I bet it makes a lot of racket flopping about like that.

[Ducman69 Posted Jul 9th 2010 7:48AM]

@wopper

Thats what she said.

[cafenoir Posted Jul 8th 2010 9:31PM]

Wow! It's very impressive that this has been done at McGill. Congrats!

[mimic Posted Jul 8th 2010 10:11PM]

My name is Anqi Xu, and I am a Ph.D. student working at McGill University's Mobile Robotics Lab, where we design the software (and some of the hardware) that goes inside the Aqua vehicles. I would like to thank Engadget for this coverage, and thank you guys for the kind comments. Let me try to address some of the questions posed above:

@grahamj
We primarily write C++ code that is targetted for one of the 2 onboard CPUs (one for real-time vehicular control and the other for processing sensor data and for general computing). We have also implemented Python and Lua interfaces for different parts of the framework, which are designed to hasten and facilitate the programming process.

@HoldenMccrotch
The vehicle is completely waterproof (kind of a requirement for underwater robotics), so there is not much cleaning required. We do occasionally get a bit of sand in the screw holes, but it sure beats scooping poop.

@Bratan @colemagoo
http://www.independentrobotics.com
Please contact us for pricing XD

@grahamj
Although Aqua can be tele-operated using a dual joystick controller, my colleagues and I at the Mobile Robotics Lab have been and are designing algorithms that makes the robot completely autonomous. For example, we conceived a complete programming language using the barcode-like markers that you've seen in one of the video clips. By either showing or tracing some shapes with these markers in front of Aqua, divers can instruct the robot to do very complicated sequences of tasks while in the water, on the spot!

@xxxsam
What if the boat was a robot too? Stay tuned for more information XD

@Brazen521
You are absolutely correct -- RHex is a progenitor of Aqua, but you might be interested to know that the first RHex robot was built at McGill too (in collaborations with different American universities including CMU & UPenn). Although RHex was truly a revolutionary terrestrial robot, Aqua's amphibious qualities makes it quite unique as well. In fact, I don't know of another robot in the world that can take off gracefully from the bottom of the ocean (more than 120 feet underwater), swim among the fishes towards the surface, stand up on the beach, and start walking away!

[HappyHerpes Posted Jul 8th 2010 11:11PM]

This is really old news. I saw this sometime last year.