robotsubmarine
Latest
ICYMI: Coral protector bot, non-ugly wearable glasses & more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-251016").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The nation's largest vision insurance company, VSP, is beta-testing wearable health-tracking glasses and somehow they don't even look ridiculous. An autonomous robot submarine is patrolling coral reefs and killing the starfish that normally eat coral, to preserve the reef. (So many conflicting feelings, amirite?) And MIT researchers are back with another 3D printer to blow your mind. This one is machine-vision enabled, meaning it can scan as it prints and correct itself.
Robotic Nereus submarine aims to explore the depths of Challenger Deep
Robotic submarines have already achieved some pretty impressive feats of submersion, but this new Nereus sub developed by the folks at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution looks set to out-do those in a fairly big way, with it now on track to dive down into all 11,000 meters of the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean. What's more, while the sub can be operated remotely, it also has a fully autonomous mode, which'll let it make use of the on-board chemical sensors, sonar, and digital photography to seek out areas of interest and map out "vast swathes of the seafloor" before returning to the ship automatically. As you might have guessed, all of that comes at a fairly hefty price tag -- about $5 million -- and it seems like may only be the first of a flood of robotic submarines to come, with British, French, Russian and Japanese teams said to be watching the Nereus' progress "with interest." It doesn't look like they'll have to wait all that long for the big show, however, as the sub is apparently now starting to undergo a series of progressively difficult test dives in advance of the main event planned for late May or early June.
DepthX robot submarine passes first test
As Popular Science reports, inventor/spelunker Bill Stone's DepthX robot submarine recently underwent its first successful test in Mexico's La Pilita underwater cave, which Stone hopes is only the first step on the bot's way to exploring Jupiter's ice-covered moon, Europa. After a slight delay with some suspicious border guards, the robot quickly got to work on its initial field test, diving some 300 feet down into the cave system, collecting samples, capturing images, and building a 3D map of the area. As the video after the break shows, the robot is definitely built to impress, with some decidedly sci-fi sounding sound effects adding the perfect final touch. According to Popular Science, DepthX will undergo another field test next month, to be followed by a considerably bigger challenge in May, when it'll dive more than 1,000 feet into the Zacaton, the world's deepest sinkhole.[Via Slash Gear]
