Newfoundland university needs your help to find lost underwater robot

If you happen to find yourself on a beach, or out on the water, around Newfoundland's Conception Bay in the next while, and you happen to see what looks like a yellow torpedo either washed up on shore or floating around, don't be alarmed; it's not a stray piece of military hardware, it's just a little lost science robot.

"It's a very distinctive thing and I would like to also say that in no way is it dangerous in any way … it is not at all a danger to anybody," said Neil Riggs, an engineer working with the robot at the Autonomous Oceans Systems Laboratory (AOSL) at Newfoundland's Memorial University, according to CBC News.

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I can certainly understand his desire to get that point across. With a $200,000 price tag on the robot, the last thing you want is for someone to spot it, but then flee the area, leaving it to possibly be damaged or permanently lost, or even for someone to decide to be a hero and smash it up 'so it can't do any harm'.

The science and technology this robot is using is pretty cool, though. It's an autonomous underwater glider, meaning that it runs on its own, without a human operator, using its own buoyancy and wings to glide through the water, roughly the same way an airborne glider uses thermal updrafts and its wings to fly. Making it even more cool, the robot was out in the water taking readings of Earth's magnetic field, to see if it could be used to navigate, similar to the way some fish and animals do.

"It's very difficult to navigate robots using an awful lot of expensive infrastructure. So we thought that if we could use something that is already there, like the earth's magnetic field, we may be able to do it way more inexpensively and perhaps just as effectively," Riggs told CBC News.

"It's been out for eight or nine days collecting very important data for research projects that we are doing here at the lab. This was something that was planned for quite a long time and the loss of data will be a setback for some of the research we are doing here, particularly for PhD students," he said in the interview.

According to the interview, Riggs believes that the robot is somewhere between Foxtrap and Portugal Cove, but it could be found just outside that area too, and he's asking that people keep an eye out for it. As for how the poor robot got lost, it's possible that it suffered a power failure, or perhaps a leak.

Robots like the one lost have been used by the oil and gas industry to map the seafloor, by the military to detect mines or submarines, and in monitoring harbour security, by scientists in various ocean and lake monitoring studies, and apparently even by drug traffickers (and possibly to foil drug traffickers).

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This kind of technology may even see its way into out-of-this-world applications like exploring the vast sub-surface ocean thought to be beneath the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa. It won't be until around 2030 before any mission to Europa gets off the ground here, but unless we find anything living on or under the surface of Mars, or we manage to establish that some planet around another star has life, a submersible could be what finds the first indication of life beyond our planet.

(Photo courtesy: Webb Research)

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