Titanium robot can work in the deep sea 6,000m

The Benthic Rover II robot is made from wear-resistant, good-pressure-resistant materials, and uses low-battery devices to operate continuously for a year.

The automatic robot Benthic Rover II, developed by a team of scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), brings a lot of valuable information when studying the deep sea for the past 7 years, Interesting Engineering reported on November 14. At the beginning of a year-long operation cycle, the robot will be dropped to a location called Station M about 225km off the coast of California.

In a new study published in the journal Science Robotics earlier this month, the team at MBARI presents some of the information the Benthic Rover II collects about the deep sea floor. For example, in the period November 2015 - November 2020, the amount of dead phytoplankton and plant matter sinking to the seabed increased sharply, along with a decrease in the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water on the seabed.

"Deep-sea exploration robots help track connections between the water column and the seabed over the long term. Understanding such connections is crucial to predicting the health and productivity of the blue planet over time. climate change," explains scientist Ken Smith at MBARI.

To understand Earth's climate and carbon cycle, scientists need to understand the deep sea. However, difficulties such as the high pressure and corrosive nature of seawater make it nearly impossible to send the instrument to the deep sea floor to study carbon activity.

The Benthic Rover II helps to overcome this problem with its ability to continuously monitor the seafloor. Because of its non-stop operation, the robot can record interesting phenomena that scientists have never observed before, according to Alana Sherman, an expert at MBARI. "If you don't keep watching, you can miss the main act," explains Sherman.

The Benthic Rover II is built from wear-resistant titanium, plastic and pressure-resistant foam. Thanks to that, this robot can operate at a maximum depth of about 6,000 m. It is equipped with a computer control system and software that can run for a year without failure.

In addition, Benthic Rover II also uses electronic devices that consume very little energy, so the battery is still enough for a year. The robot is quite large with a length of 2.6 m, a width of 1.7 m and a height of 1.5 m. However, it only consumes an average of 2 watts of power, about the same as an iPhone.