Robotic Gliders Soar Underwater

zymano writes "Yahoo has this tech news on ocean gliders that can go on journeys for hundreds of miles and last for weeks using pumps that push ballast water in and out to subtly change their buoyancy. This enables them to alternately rise and fall through the ocean as they glide forward. Oh , $60,000 if you want one." See our previous stories for more information.

Comments

Imagine the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet the US military would love these things. You could easily weaponize these things! From mine sweeping to hunting down enemy subs these things would rock.

I wonder

[mental_telepathy]

What their towing capacity is? Can they run fiber out to my private island? Or, for the 20 foot ones, do rescue missions (Remember the trapped Russian Sailors in the sub?)

Non military uses

[Gothmolly]

How about free, albeit slow, cargo delivery? Get a tug to tow containers/gliders to a 'safe' distance from the traffic surrounding a port, point the glider at its destination, set its GPS coordinates, and let it go. 3 months later, your boxes of widgets arrive at their destination, where another tug picks up the stuff at the other end.

No fuel
No staff
24x7 operation
weather independent

Re:Non military uses

[PPGMD]

Personally I highly doubt that it will work because during the Cold War the US deployed a series of Sonar nets through out the oceans to detect Soviet submarines.

They are called the Sound Surveillance System (SOUS), word was that it could detect Soviet subs leaving their North Sea bases from the US.
You can find more information here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/sosus .htm

Midwater research could really use this?

[ianscot]

The biggest habitat on earth is the ocean's "mid water," below where light can penetrate and above the abyssal depths. When biologists go down for a look there, they're trying to observe from a blind that's totally conspicuous, noisy, and thrashing around a ton. Even the latest scientific robot submersibles are pretty noisy hydraulic monstrosities -- the Monterey Bay Acquatic Research Institute's being decent examples.

Still, even in Monterey Bay, MBARI has seen all kinds of new siphonophores (look halfway down) and so on -- really amazing animals that may be the biggest group of predators on earth, but that we know next to nothing about.

A low-speed, quiet, long-term observation platform would be made to order for, to use that example, siphonophores: they're slow-moving, they hunt by drifting along extending toxic tentacles, but they're often disturbed by the existing robot subs. Or set this thing to watching a whale carcass as it floats around: scientists have a lot of ideas about the roles dead whales may play, but no way of really observing them long-term.

The lack of speed isn't going to let you follow something like squid around; teuthids have a much better water jet system that'll let them outrun and outmaneuver almost anything we've got. But this'd give us a nice, quiet observation platform for most of the stuff that lives midwater and drifts -- which seems to be a huge share of the life on earth, and almost unexplored by science.