A team of mechanical engineers at Beihang University, working with a deep-sea diving specialist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a mechanic from Zhejiang University, all in China, have designed, built, and tested a marine robot that can swim, crawl, and glide untethered in the deepest parts of the ocean.

In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes the factors that went into their design and how well their robot performed when tested.

Over the past several decades, underwater robots have become very important tools for studying the various parts of the world’s oceans and the creatures that live in them. More recently, it has been noted that most such craft, especially those that are sent to very deep parts of the sea, are cumbersome and not very agile.