Underwater remains mostly an unexplored territory and it’s high time we know more considering that waters make up 70% of the earth surface. A start-up aims to do just that with EVE – the Ellipsoidal Vehicle for Exploration, the small robots that is yellow, cute and looks a lot like a pumpkin. EVE’s 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.

“We do not yet have a very cheap, scalable, easily deployable method of scanning large areas of the ocean,” says Bhattacharyya, who founded her company Hydroswarm.

What’s great about EVE is that it’s completely autonomous, making it cheaper and less labour intensive. “With a swarm you can get faster coverage of a big area,” says Yogesh Girdhar of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

These robots could be trained to find pollution due to oil spills, coral habitat loss and general pollution down in the depths of the oceans. It’s elliptical frame make it perfect for sensory fittings. Submerged aircrafts could be sought out by fitting the robots to track down pings from a downed jet’s black box.

“Underwater, if two robots are talking to each other, they pollute the entire sound channel,” says Girdhar. “That means everybody else on the network has to stay quiet.” EVE is probably too small to be picked up by other sensors currently working at the oceans. Real-time video processing is also a challenge. Not to mention, EVE’s battery life is about 2.5 hours which makes for short trips. “These are all challenges, but they’re all solvable theoretically,” Girdhar says.

“I think autonomous robots right now are most needed underwater”, rather than in aerial or land environments, says Girdhar. “Hopefully these kinds of start-ups will bridge that gap. I think the future is small robots, and a lot of them.”

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Author: Technology Blog