Underwater Robots could help Investigate Deep-Sea Operations
Researchers are increasingly turning to robots to perform deep-sea operations to learn more about coral reefs and other underwater ecosystems.
Image Credit: Shutterstock/cdelacy
The world’s coral reefs provide a habitat for a wide range of aquatic species, ensuring that the oceans are beautiful and diverse ecosystems. However, the increasing warming of the oceans due to climate changes and other stressors such as increasing levels of pollution are causing bleaching events at increasingly short intervals, thus rapidly depleting corals.
Projects are currently underway to save coral reefs, but any rescue attempt for these living ecosystems requires knowledge, as do models of how rapidly coral reefs are shrinking. And collecting information about organisms that exist beneath the waves isn’t always easy. This is especially true when human divers and human-manned vehicles struggle to squeeze into the tight spaces found
By Steve Gregory, KFI News
May 21, 2021
Photo Credit: Steve Gregory
Some engineers in Simi Valley have shown off their contributions to the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter. KFI s Steve Gregory was there.
The work done by AeroVironment represents a pretty big chunk of the design of the interplanetary aircraft. What percentage of Ingenuity were you responsible for? Well, that s a good question. You know, it was a big team effort. Everybody worked on a lot of different parts, you know, big team effort.
Can you tell that s a bit of a sensitive question? All we can say is what we built and what we didn t build and what we worked with them together on it and but the rotor system was the main thing this is the the rotor blades, the motors, the actuators, the swash plates, the central mast, the backer for the solar array, and then the landing gear, support plate, those hinges you saw and then the landing legs themselves.