A fleet of 100 robotic submarines could in 5 years’ time be roaming the vast unexplored stretches of the world’s seafloors and helping unlock their mysteries. “The pace of exploration in the ocean is going a little too slowly”. Only 5% of the ocean floor has been explored in detail, which means there may be numerous new species and geothermal processes waiting to be discovered.

NOAA plans to map the oceans floors with unmanned vehicles.
2010-10-25: Antarctica Ocean UAV. Such a baby step. we should have fleets of fully autonomous ocean robots by now, mapping the sea floors.

Gavia, a bullet-shaped robot developed by the University of British Columbia, is currently in Antarctica on a mission to explore heretofore uncharted areas of the ocean.

2013-04-21: Some speculation

excavating the past will mean deploying teams of remote-sensing robotic machines semi-autonomously flying, crawling, gridding, scanning, squeezing, and non-destructively burrowing their way into lost rooms and buried cities, perhaps even translating ancient languages along the way.

2018-11-20: Robot Wreck Discovery

The wreckage of the ARA San Juan (S-42) was found by Ocean Infinity. Ocean Infinity used 5 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to carry out the search. Ocean Infinity’s ocean search capability is the most advanced in the world. Their AUV’s are capable of operating in depths from 5 meters to 6000 meters and covering vast areas of the seabed at unparalleled speed. The AUVs are not tethered, allowing them to go deeper and collect higher quality data. They are equipped with side scan sonar, a multi-beam echo-sounder HD camera, and synthetic aperture sonar. Ocean Infinity is able to deploy 2 work class ROVs and heavy lifting equipment capable of retrieving objects weighing up to 45T from 6000 meters.

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