The football-sized robots are designed to work in packs,programmed for various tasks from locating wreckage to detecting contraband through a ship’s hullWhen Sampriti Bhattacharyya read approximately a controversial US Navy scheme in which dolphins try to locate sea mines she realised the true potential of the robot she was working on.
Bhattacharyya’s underwater device, approximately the size of a football, and had been developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a tool to detect cracks or splits in nuclear reactor tanks. When Bhattacharyya saw that dolphins were being used to detect mines and locate equipment lost underwater,a world of possibilities opened up – among them mapping the ocean floor or scanning the hull of ships for contraband.
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Source: theguardian.com