
These Tiny Boats Will Change How We Understand The Ocean - evo_9
http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678867/these-tiny-boats-will-change-how-we-understand-the-ocean
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eugenejen
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!

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Retric
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.

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finnw
> 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.)

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akkartik
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>

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NathanKP
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...](http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678872/methods-plastic-madness-
ocean-trash-to-detergent-bottles)) 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.

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epscylonb
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?.

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artmageddon
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.

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libraryatnight
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.

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blcArmadillo
In my opinion this video
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eATawqVOXWI&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eATawqVOXWI&feature=player_embedded))
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!

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callmeed
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."

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grannyg00se
Interesting. I wonder: is it common for people to associate the word robot
with a humanoid form, or had your wife recently watched iRobot?

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lloeki
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".

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eru
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".

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mturmon
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>

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anoother
Site is completely mangled in Opera 11.52

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

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

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jt11508
Looks like a very cool technology, wonder if they will release the data to the
public?

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andrewtbham
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."

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quanticle
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.

