“While all eyes were on the dramatic descent of NASA’s Perseverance rover last month, a team sent a robot into another alien world, one closer to home: the deep sea.
With its towering undersea mountains, dramatic geological features, and unique creatures—many of which remain mysterious—the deep sea is the last uncharted environment on Earth. The inaccessibility isn’t surprising. Sinking any intrepid explorer into blackened waters means facing freezing temperatures and crushing pressure. Ever listened to the sound of metal creaking under pressure? It’s absolutely terrifying. Without protection, puny electronic components in a robot don’t have a chance.
Yet despite these hostile conditions, biology’s found a way to thrive. And scientists have taken note. Inspired by a deep sea fish, a team from China engineered a soft autonomous robot that can withstand the punishing conditions of the lowest low—the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The robot’s body roughly resembles a stingray, with two large flapping fins and a tail that allows it to easily maneuver through the surrounding waters.
Rather than having a single ‘brain,’ the robot’s delicate electronics are spread out through its silicon body, similar to the nervous system of worms. This design removes the need for heavy and clunky pressure-resistant cases, explained Drs. Cecilia Laschi and Marcello Calisti at the National University of Singapore and the University of Lincoln, respectively, who were not involved in the work.
It’s not just theoretical talk. The team put their robot to the test, actually sinking it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. The robot thrived, flapping around in its surroundings and perhaps intriguing or bewildering native marine animals.
The bot ‘pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved,’ said Laschi and Calisti. The deep sea is a gold mine of unique biology, enormous geological features, and mineral resources. With a soft but tough-as-nails robot, we may finally have a way to explore uncharted ocean depths.
Under Pressure
Maneuvering down the Mariana Trench is harder than scaling Mount Everest without oxygen.
The Challenger Deep, at over 35,000 feet below sea level, represents the lowest point of the trench. The pressure there is hard to wrap your head around: roughly a thousand times the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level, or more colorfully described as ‘an elephant standing on your thumb.’
These crazy pressures are why deep sea exploration equipment is normally heavily enforced. ‘Rigid robots and machines require pressure vessels’ to encapsulate them, the authors explained, which are often made of bulky and cumbersome metallic material. Navigating these depths ends up as a game of playing catch-up, in which the thickness and dimensions of these enclosures need to scale up to cope with increasing pressure. Even so, the extreme conditions of the deep sea make structural failure easy.
By the time classic bots reach the Challenger Deep, they’re basically rigid bots wearing heavy metal gloves—clunky and hardly natural. They don’t fit in with their surrounding environment, with heavy arms and propellers that can potentially damage any marine, coral, or other samples they pick up.”
View the whole story here: https://singularityhub.com/2021/03/09/this-stingray-like-soft-robot-went-35000-feet-below-sea-level-and-thrived-there/