When Liquid Robotics set four of their one of a kind sea vehicle Wave Glider robots on a slow journey across the Pacific in November 2011 from the California coast, they had never thought that one robot out of the four would would actually cap off their amazing journey to Brisbane, Australia across the world’s largest body of water; the Pacific ocean. During this 9,000 nautical mile journey to Australia, the little robot that could, named Papa Mau faced a lot of hurdles, ranging from shark bitse to battles with 100 miles per hour winds and 30 foot waves.
However, in spite of all these obstacles, Papa Mau was able to finish its journey and claimed the world record for being the only autonomous vehicle at sea or on land that has traveled so far. Papa Mau was the only one Wave Gliders of the four that has completed its journey. As Liquid Robotics had sent two Wave Gliders towards Brisbane, Australia and the other two were set for Shikoku, Japan, which are still in transit.
Still it took Papa Mau a long time to finish this journey, because it was going forward with a speed of one and a half knots and it also had to make pit stops in order to sync data and for overhauling, as according to Bill Vass, CEO of Liquid Robotics, “The ocean’s a rough place to operate”.
Nonetheless, Liquid Robotics has remained successful in achieving its goal to an extent, as by sending these surf-board like gliders on such a long journey they learned more about imprving, allowing them develop new innovations like improving their Wave Glider technology that pushes the robot forward through wave energy.
Liquid Robotics collected all this information with the help of sensors, which were mounted on each of these four Wave Gliders that measured phytoplankton activity, salinity levels, oil spills and much more in the sea.
After achieving this milestone, Liquid Robotics is now eyeing the PacX Challenge for which they had selected five scientists, each of whom will be asked to give in research that describe what they could do with Wave Glider’s data sets. The winner of this competition will not only get $50,000 for research, but he or she will also get to use a Wave Glider for 6 months.
Source: FastCoExist
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