> After around 100 missions, during which they spent 400 hours in the cramped submarine, the three-man crew tracked the creature from a spot some 15 kilometres (nine miles) east of Chichi island in the north Pacific.
Because that sounds sub-optimal. Do you really need humans for tracking?
So say you have a robot that's autonomously floating around look at stuff and then it goes by a giant squid. There is no one to tell it "Hey! Look, a giant squid! Stop and turn your camera at that!" so it just keeps going.
Also, I have no idea how they would know where they're currently located (again, no GPS).. but I'm sure they have some solution.
One huge advantage I could see is potentially you wouldn't need to pressurize anything. Optics can easily be made to work immersed in water, electronics can be slathered in epoxy so you don't get any short circuits. Then there shouldn't be any limit to how deep the thing can go.
US Naval Submarines have done this for a long time.
You give it some kind of sensor. When it finds something bigger than 3 m at a depth of more than 500 m you start following it. I'm not saying that's easy, but we have self-driving cars and we send robots to Mars (average distance 200 million km). I'm sure we could do it, if there was interest.
Autonomous underwater vehicles are an active area of research. One of the challenges involved are localization once the vehicle has dived. You cannot get GPS under water, so one way to localize yourself is by tracking your velocity/acceleration once the dive has begun. Another way is to exchange messages with your peer robots and devise a distributed location resolution scheme. See some of the work done in my lab in these areas: http://arl.nus.edu.sg/twiki/bin/view/ARL/STARFISH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remotely_operated_underwater_ve...
if you've got something like a whale where it surfaces often you can do wireless tagging but that's about it for automatic exploration.
I still to this day am in absolute fascination of random pictures that show up of creatures from places like the Mariana Trench. It just boggles my tiny brain that so much biological diversity exists.
Here's a few that popped up on Reddit the other day -- http://imgur.com/a/xkfSv
"And lo on the seventh day, God slammed a bunch of shit He wasn't finished with down at the bottom of a trench and hoped that nobody would notice."
Hatchetfish: ghost-dead-floating fish-heads from hell!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/08/giant-squid-video-j...
I thought it was generally held that we know less about the world's oceans than we do about the space around us.
http://www.reddit.com/r/deepseacreatures/
Amazing pictures from a brand new (day old) community. :)
Why is it always the Japanese researchers that study these yummy species like squid and whale? Is it that kind of research that ends with shipping the study probes to a high class restaurant at the end?
