2 years, 2 months ago
What area of the ocean did the Sentry Deep Sea robot map? Why is this research important?
How are autonomous robots helping reduce the cost of expensive research?
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M$1 Answer
The area was off the coast of Washington state.
Sentry can survey wide swaths of undersea territory on dives lasting a day or more. The autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, are pre-programmed to maintain a designated course but have enough decision-making capacity to avoid collisions with seafloor terrain. They are equipped with sonar to navigate and to map the seafloor and arrays of sensors that can measure water temperature and salinity, for example, or “sniff out” telltale chemicals that signal places and phenomena that scientists want to investigate.
Sentry can survey wide swaths of undersea territory on dives lasting a day or more. The autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, are pre-programmed to maintain a designated course but have enough decision-making capacity to avoid collisions with seafloor terrain. They are equipped with sonar to navigate and to map the seafloor and arrays of sensors that can measure water temperature and salinity, for example, or “sniff out” telltale chemicals that signal places and phenomena that scientists want to investigate.
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M$
Could the same research be done without a robot? What are the time and cost for using the robot?
How big of a breakthrough was the sentry?
It was a huge breakthrough because
-It is a state-of-the-art, free-swimming underwater robot that can operate independently, without tethers or other connections to a research ship.
-It is pre-programmed with guidance for deep-water surveying, but it can also make its own decisions about navigation on the terrain of the seafloor
-It can dive as deep as 5,000 meters (3.1 miles) into the ocean while powered by Lithium batteries (similar to the ones used in a laptop).
Hope are that soon in the near future, Sentry will conduct high-resolution oceanographic surveys that would be otherwise impossible.
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