It is about time that the world of science let go of the tiny deep-sea submersibles which takes in scientist for underwater exploration. It is about time to embrace something more state-of-the-art.
MIT engineers have built a system which allows autonomous underwater drones to take over and work the basic details of missions without having the need for careful planning, meticulous details and the whole shebang.
The standard process consists of researchers crafting scripts for defining every little movement an autonomous sea rover makes but these detailed plans are too much work especially if these engineers have to coordinate a group of machines navigating the seas in tandem.
The new system created by MIT allows them in setting higher-level commands which gives the rover the flexibility to react to things they find in the ways and alter priorities when longer time is necessary for completing objectives. It may seem ordinary for now, but in the future it has a lot of potential of exploring oceans without too much human supervision and help out research institutions by easily dumping these drones into the ocean for vast amount of data which they would be collecting.
MIT professor leading the project, Brian Williams said that, “What we want you to be able to do is tell the robots what you want them to do in terms of goals and natural language. You can fundamentally change the way you explore the ocean.”
“These vehicles could plan their own missions, and execute, adapt, and re-plan them alone, without human support,” he said.
Engineers would have more time to think about overall strategies by giving robots control of higher-level decision-making. This system has the potential of reducing the size of the operational team needed on research cruises.
“If you look at the ocean right now, we can use Earth-orbiting satellites, but they don’t penetrate much below the surface. You could send sea vessels which send one autonomous vehicle, but that doesn’t show you a lot. This technology can offer a whole new way to observe the ocean, which is exciting,” says William in a report published in the MIT Technology Review.
