Swarm of underwater robots helps scientists study ocean dynamics

A group of small, autonomous robots awaiting deployment off the La Jolla coast. “If you want to find another plankter just like you so you can have sex, the equivalent in human terms would be person at the far end of a football field and you both have blindfolds on and you’re just randomly walking around hoping to bump into each other,” said study coauthor Peter Franks, a biological oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “If you stick a finger in the ocean in one place, you don’t know what’s happening elsewhere,” explained lead author Jules Jaffe, an ocean engineer at Scripps. “Jules is an absolute genius at inventing ocean instruments, and I’m always looking for new ways to look at things in the ocean,” Franks said. Now that they’ve been built and tested, these swarming sensors could be put to all kinds of uses, from monitoring oil spills and red tides to exploring the behavior of other sea creatures – for example, by listening to the calls of whales, or by tracking animals that start off as larvae on or near shores and whose complex life cycles force them to move through the ocean in ways that researchers don’t yet fully understand.