[mellow music] One of the largest,
and safest passenger jets ever made,
simply disappears off the radar.
Remember Malaysia Air 370?
Ever since it disappeared in 2014,
countries and companies
have been searching for the vanished aircraft.
There was a second search,
led by the U.S. exploration firm, Ocean Infinity.
While the plane was never found,
the recovery effort had an unforeseen benefit,
the greatest mapping of the ocean floor in history.
96,000 square miles of detailed seabed data
collected with extraordinary speed.
But we know only about five to 7% of our ocean floor,
the rest is not known at the moment in a detailed way.
So, we know less about the ocean
than we know about the surface of Mars.
New underwater drones are changing that.
They have found wrecks,
collected valuable oceanographic data,
and uncovered new natural resources.
Mapping the ocean can be crucial
in understanding mechanisms of climate change,
meaning that in the push to map the oceans of the world,
the clock is ticking.
There's a company in Houston
that is a bunch of former NASA engineers.
They came into the marine sector
because they wanted a challenge. [chuckles]
They said, "Look, space is a really inert environment.
We know where the equipment's at, we can talk to it,
and we don't have to deal with pressure."
That's Josh Broussard,
he's the CTO of Ocean Infinity, one of the companies
that searched for Malaysia Air 370
and is on the cutting edge of underwater drones,
which are often referred to as AUVs.
An AUV is an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.
It's a robot designed to operate under water,
completely independent of human supervision.
These are vehicles that we actually design
and build in our lab.
They can be used to measure the quality of the ocean water,
or the bathymetry of the ocean floor.
Dan Stilwell and Stefano Brizzolara,
run the AUV R&D Department of Virginia Tech.
AUV technology is relatively new,
but carries a lot of advantages
over traditional, manned submarines.
Because AUVs don't have to house human bodies,
they can be smaller, more efficient,
and can go deeper.
We can survey as much as two
and a half kilometers wide per AUV,
so we can cover a lot of ground,
and we can take sonar imagery
down to three to five centimeters,
But the average ocean depth is over 10,000 feet.
That means AUVs involved in bathymetry,
or search and recovery missions, has to be incredibly tough.
The vehicle has to be designed
to withstand tremendous pressures in the deep ocean.
There's no light,
so if you want to take a picture,
you've gotta bring your own illumination.
The other challenge is communication.
[whooshing]
The deep ocean is pitch black.
There's no internet,
no cell service, no GPS, and with ocean currents,
AUVs aren't able to maintain fixed predictable positions.
Once you send an AUV on a mission,
for all practical purposes, it goes dark.
Underwater communication is done acoustically with sound.
The bandwidth is really low,
so that the amount of information
you can send through the water column
is really, really small.
What you've got is like worse
than the '90s dial-up internet by orders of magnitude,
and you're trying to send really complex information
about where they're located in a 3D space.
But new AUV technology aims to script this limitation
by using swarming, also known as collaborative autonomy.
We could program a bunch of robots
to operate at the same time,
but collaborative autonomy
is getting them to work cooperatively,
to share information,
to jointly make decisions about what to do next.
We can mount some very sophisticated sensors onboard
in order to estimate their position.
If AUVs collaborate together,
your spatial awareness improves, your navigation improves,
you could re-task a vehicle based on information
that another one may have collected.
Many fixate on space
as the last place for true exploration,
and the means by which we'll save our species
or spur the greatest innovations.
Yet our own oceans, present daunting challenges
and countless unknowns.
It is the final dark frontier of our planet.
The Earth's surface is 70% water,
and the oceans hold over 90% of its life,
but its health is in serious jeopardy.
Biodiversity is falling, plastic is building up.
That means that ocean mapping,
could be crucial to understanding climate change
and how to protect those on land from hurricanes,
sea level rise, and other threats.
Organizations like Seabed 2030
are using AUV technology to accelerate ocean mapping.
They aim to bring together all available bathymetric data
to produce the definitive map of the world ocean floor,
by 2030, and make it available to everyone.
Soon, we may have vastly different understanding
of our largest natural resource.
In fact, our future may depend on it.
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