Slashdot Mirror
Long-Running Underwater Robot Lost At Sea
this_boat_is_real writes "Somewhere off the coast of Chile a pioneering underwater robot named Abe lies in a watery grave today. The Autonomous Benthic Explorer was one of the first truly independent research submersibles, being both unmanned and un-tethered to its launching ship. While on its 222nd research dive on Friday all contact with the craft was lost, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has announced."
what? no skynet tag?
bet the robot became self-aware and decided "to hell with this....I'm making a break for it!"
Now, it's probably in league with those sharks with laser beams.
Abe is now sleeping with the fishes.
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
You think there is a mechanism of recovery more robust than the device itself? The pressure that sub handled was ungodly.
Well, may it's not lost.
Maybe the sub truly is autonomous, as in "having autonomy; not subject to control from outside; independent"?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Touché, vulgar anonymous poster.
The people that design these things are smart. Smarter than the average poster here in their field. If Joe Armchairengineer can think it up, I'm pretty damn confident that the engineers behind ABE thought of it too.
In fact, from the WHOI release, there's this nugget:
From the WHOI press release: "ABE was equipped with several independent systems to bring it back to the surface at the end of a dive or should a fault occur. The Melville remained in the vicinity to see if ABE had resurfaced, at first searching for ABE’s strobe lights in the darkness. Researchers tried to establish radio contact with ABE in the event it had surfaced, but attempts turned up nothing."
Protip: the people that design these things can, and likely do, fit square pegs in round holes.
Suggesting "durrr, attach a balloon" is, in my not very humble opinion, insulting to the engineers behind these things.
That, or the fact that 'benthic' is an adjective referring to the bottom of the ocean.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/benthic
http://www.goominet.com/unspeakable-vault/vault/309/
...Charles Widmore must have been monitoring ABE when it somehow found the Island. I expect we'll see a fake press release showing ABE's resting place any time now.
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Activate tearducts and proceed with robot mourning routine!
I spend most of my time in bed, darling.
and thanks for all the fish!
Air doesn't work because of the enormous pressure involved. A 3000 psi scuba tank could only inflate a balloon down to about 2000 meters. Below that, the water pressure is greater than that inside the tank, and opening the valve would result in water forcing the balloon into the tank, rather than air inflating the balloon. A 10000 psi high pressure tank would work at 5000 meters, but would only result in about a 30% increase in volume, meaning you'd need a very big tank to be able to raise the entire craft in a catastrophic failure. Furthermore, the air would expand as the craft rose, risking rupturing the balloon. That's why the buoyancy control uses an oil bladder - oil is relatively incompressible.
Dropping the ascent weight helps raise the craft at the end of a mission. But usually they're relatively lightweight so you can attach them manually. The 17-inch glass spheres typically used to house equipment provides over 50 pounds of buoyancy. The failure of one of these spheres at a depth of 3000 meters (~4500 psi) would release (4500 psi) * 4/3 * pi * (8.5 inches)^3 = 1.3 MJ of energy. A stick of dynamite is about 2.1 MJ, so losing one sphere is pretty much guaranteed to cause all the other spheres to fail. If the remainder of the craft somehow survived all that energy release, the loss in buoyancy would overwhelm what buoyancy you'd get by dropping the ascent weight.
And maybe, just maybe, one of the glass flotation spheres had a flaw in it and it imploded, like they said.