These Tiny Boats Will Change How We Understand The Ocean | Hacker News Reader

These Tiny Boats Will Change How We Understand The Ocean

fastcoexist.com

70 pointsevo_923 comments

When I read the Mar Rover article this morning, I was thinking it seems like we can apply the same technologies on the surface of Earth to explore Oceans, Antarctica, Arctic areas, Sahara Desert, Gobi Desert, Amazon Jungle, where there were not enough human explorations so far and to collect data and to solve some technology challenges to build machines/computers/communications systems that can roaming on those environments and economically way to sustain those information gathering efforts. (including replacement/dropping off those bots in those difficult areas)

I suddenly understood most our knowledge on those locations are probably based on few high resolution statistical samplings done in human explorations plus low resolution statistical sampling from Satellites Images. It may be good to build those bots to have real time high resolution sampling and let data scientists discover more facts and knowledge!

I really doubt that there is all that much meaningful diversity in most of those areas.* After all I can create a 50+ gigabyte image file by scanning a white piece of paper but that does not mean it's worth the disk space.

*Now if you can go really high resolution you might be on to something. You can gather useful information from DNA sequencing dirt samples from your back yard. But, we can't do that with rovers and photographs, temperature, and PH levels etc would be far less useful.

> The miniature ships built by Liquid Robotics ...

In case anyone wasn't aware of it, this is the company that James Gosling now works for. (I have no idea whether he is involved in this project or not.)

It's the whole reason he left Google so quickly. I've been enjoying reading his updates on the project. There's a far better video at http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/cool_robot_video

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/091028.html

is a talk by a liquid robotics founder.

Although these boats are to be used for research it would be fascinating to make a similar ocean robot which specializes in herding ocean trash and collecting it for recycling.

Another article from the same site (http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678872/methods-plastic-madness-o...) is about the ocean trash problem and a startup whose goal is to process low quality, sun brittled plastics such as those in the Pacific Ocean trash patch.

But the article makes the very valid point that gathering plastics from the ocean is a labor intensive effort. It would be cool to see a combination of autonomous robots such as these that could herd floating plastic trash and take it back to base stations for collection and recycling.

I guess you would call such a trash-collecting robot WALL-C?

Isn't the real danger from the ocean garbage patches that the rubbish breaks down to the point where you can't easily collect it up?.

A lot of it is already at that point, but its costly for collecting by human-run ships. Robots can work tirelessly, provided they have power. In my mind, that changes the equation, assuming we can devise a robot that can do the job.

This is wonderful! That the data is going to be released to anyone willing to register for it is fantastic. I love that we can keep an eye to the stars, but it's compelling to have a world that feels alien down here on Earth.

In my opinion this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eATawqVOXWI&feature=playe...) is a much better demonstration of the glider in work than the one in the article. I think it's pretty cool to see the full system working!

INT. BEDROOM AT NIGHT We are reading on our iPads

ME "Oh cool, robots that are swimming across the ocean ..."

WIFE "Let me see ..."

[Shows article]

WIFE "Umm ... that's not a robot. I was expecting to see the thing from iRobot swimming like a person."

Interesting. I wonder: is it common for people to associate the word robot with a humanoid form, or had your wife recently watched iRobot?

Yes it is. People don't understand my dishwasher is the one of the greatest robots in my house.

Funnily the actual word for humanoid robots is android, but it seems Star Wars whacked the meaning of droid so far off its original meaning (screw you R2D2) that for the masses the meanings of robot and android are reversed.

PS: (nitpicky) it's "I, Robot".

Robot originally referred to andoids, too. The word was invented by Karel Čapek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_%C4%8Capek) for one of his plays. I recommend his "War with the Newts".

This article doesn't mention other work in the area. Other teams have done field work with autonomous self-powered vehicles powered by thermal differences.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-111

Site is completely mangled in Opera 11.52

Don't know why you got down-votes, but it is indeed completely unreadable in Opera. IE crashes.

Any commentary on whether or not picking up debris is a problem?

Looks like a very cool technology, wonder if they will release the data to the public?

the article states "Whatever happens, we’ll all know about it. Every piece of data gathered by the robots will be made available in real-time (and for free) to anyone who registers."

I'm really excited about this. With tools like Amazon's Elastic Map-Reduce, it's actually possible for those not affiliated with a research institution to process this data and attempt to draw conclusions from it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com