I'm Jules Jaffe I'm a research
oceanographer here at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. It turned
out that there was a really ideal
application to building small autonomous
robots that can adjust their buoyancy,
migrate up and down in the water column,
and that was to study plankton:
the three-dimensional fields of ocean
currents and how plankton get pushed
around by those currents. I'm Professor
Peter Franks I am a biological
oceanographer here at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. One of the
really interesting manifestations of
physical biological interactions in the
ocean are red tides. Red tides are really
dense aggregations of a particular
organism that has grown to these huge
concentrations. And often when you see
red tides you'll see they form stripes
in the ocean that are parallel to the
shore. About 20 years ago I came up with
the mathematical theories that said that
if these organisms swim in a particular
way they'll interact with these huge
waves inside the ocean called internal
waves. I wanted to try and test this
hypothesis but to do that you have to
actually track the individual plankton
in the ocean and there's no means to do
that. And so I have this wonderful
colleague here Jules Jaffe and Jules
invents instruments to look at the ocean.
And he came to me and he said well what
if we build sort of a robotic plankton
I said "Wow that'd be great!" But one
plankton is not going to do what I need
I need a whole bunch of them so that I
can actually test this hypothesis.
This is what we came up with ultimately
it's a as we described a grapefruit-sized
autonomous robot. It has the
capability of adjusting its buoyancy.
When it comes to the surface it can
call us via satellite and give us its
gps location so we can go pick
it up it's got bright light and it's got
a radio frequency kinda like your garage
changer that lets us know where it is.
Inside it's got a computer, on the bottom
here we've got a buoyancy control that
means just a piston that goes in and out
and also temperature and pressure, we
want to know how deep we are. We would
like to know what the temperature is
around us because that's one of the
things that we measure. So we deployed this
a swarm of 16 of these M-AUEs in the
ocean. The acoustic hydrophones allows us
to get continuous localizations of these
little AUEs underwater. This was the
first time we've been able to test this
hypothesis below the surface of the
ocean where you can't see these things,
you can't track them optically.
It was fairly shocking and pleasing to find
that the patterns of patch formation and
dispersion of this swarm of robot looked
exactly like the theory predicted. And so
now I think we have a much deeper
understanding of how the physics of the
ocean interacts with the swimming
organisms to create these kinds of
patches of organisms in the ocean.
There's so many things that you can do
with this. We could use them to listen to
whales and dolphins, track oil spills. One of
the things that came up in the gulf of
Mexico where is the oil going? We didn't
have autonomous floats. So the great thing
about what I do that I love is that we
can build something in a reasonable
amount of time for a reasonable amount of
money that will lead to really
interesting discoveries about what's
happening in the ocean.