THE planet鈥檚 surface is more than 70 per cent water. Yet we know more about the moon than we do about what鈥檚 going on in the deep oceans. A Massachusetts start-up has a ball-sized robot it wants to fix that.
Meet EVE 鈥� the Ellipsoidal Vehicle for Exploration 鈥� a sensor-studded yellow robot the shape of a pumpkin. EVE鈥檚 creator Sampriti Bhattacharyya, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a grand mission in mind for a swarm of EVEs: she wants to build Google Maps for the ocean.
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鈥淲e do not yet have a very cheap, scalable, easily deployable method of scanning large areas of the ocean,鈥� says Bhattacharyya, who founded her company to commercialise EVE and do exactly that. is one of 26 finalists for the MassChallenge Awards, which will select winners at the end of the month to receive a share of $1.5 million in grants. These awards are designed to help fledgling start-ups get off the ground.
Existing are remotely operated, but EVE is autonomous, making it cheaper and more feasible to use swarms of them to search large areas. 鈥淲ith a swarm you can get faster coverage of a big area,鈥� says of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Such a network of autonomous drones could be used for disaster response, coral reef monitoring, surveillance for port security and finding places to drill for oil and gas. Bhattacharyya says EVE would have been useful for monitoring pollution from the BP oil spill. Its elliptical frame can be fitted with the right sensors for its mission, such as environmental sensors to monitor pH changes. A swarm of them could be used to look for missing aircraft by fitting the robots with acoustic sensors to listen for pings from a downed jet鈥檚 black box.
鈥淚t can be operated as a single drone or as a kind of sensor network,鈥� Bhattacharyya says.
Mapping the ocean is difficult. 鈥淯nderwater, if two robots are talking to each other, they pollute the entire sound channel,鈥� says Girdhar. 鈥淭hat means everybody else on the network has to stay quiet.鈥� And he says EVE is probably too small for some sensors, such as those that measure ocean current. It鈥檚 also tricky to do real-time video processing underwater. 鈥淭hese are all challenges, but they鈥檙e all solvable theoretically,鈥� Girdhar says.
Another challenge is battery life: one charge currently lasts EVE only two and a half hours, so the length of its expeditions is limited.
Bhattacharyya says the robots will be in operation very soon.
鈥淚 think autonomous robots right now are most needed underwater鈥�, rather than in aerial or land environments, says Girdhar. 鈥淗opefully these kinds of start-ups will bridge that gap. I think the future is small robots, and a lot of them.鈥�
鈥淎utonomous robots are most needed underwater. The future is small robots, and a lot of them鈥�
(Image: Hydroswarm)
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淩obots of the Caribbean鈥�
