{"id":123933,"date":"2021-06-17T23:23:11","date_gmt":"2021-06-18T06:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/a-clever-robot-spies-on-creatures-in-the-oceans-twilight-zone"},"modified":"2021-06-17T23:23:11","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T06:23:11","slug":"a-clever-robot-spies-on-creatures-in-the-oceans-twilight-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/a-clever-robot-spies-on-creatures-in-the-oceans-twilight-zone","title":{"rendered":"A Clever Robot Spies on Creatures in the Oceans Twilight Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-clever-robot-spies-on-creatures-in-the-oceans-twilight-zone2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>But now a spy swims among them: Mesobot. Today in the journal <em>Science Robotics<\/em>, a team of engineers and oceanographers <a class=\"\"  href=\"http:\/\/robotics.sciencemag.org\/lookup\/doi\/10.1126\/scirobotics.abe1901\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">describes<\/a> how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean\u2019s \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2015\/05\/twilight-zone-deep-reefs\/\">twilight zone<\/a>,\u201d a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/06\/unraveling-mystery-oceans-twilight-zone\/\">chronically understudied<\/a> band between 650 feet and 3200 feet deep, which scientists also refer to as mid-water. Thanks to some clever engineering, the researchers did so without flustering these highly sensitive animals, making Mesobot a groundbreaking new tool for oceanographers.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s super cool from an engineering standpoint,\u201d says Northeastern University roboticist Hanumant Singh, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/dive-under-the-ice-with-the-brave-robots-of-antarctica\/\">develops ocean robots<\/a> but wasn\u2019t involved in this research. \u201cIt\u2019s really an amazing piece of work, in terms of looking at an area that\u2019s unexplored in the ocean.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Mesobot looks like a giant yellow-and-black AirPods case, only it\u2019s rather more waterproof and weighs 550 pounds. It can operate with a fiber-optic tether attached to a research vessel at the surface, or it can swim around freely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But now a spy swims among them: Mesobot. Today in the journal Science Robotics, a team of engineers and oceanographers describes how they got a new autonomous underwater vehicle to lock onto movements of organisms and follow them around the ocean\u2019s \u201ctwilight zone,\u201d a chronically understudied band between 650 feet and 3200 feet deep, which [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}