After years of development and testing, researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have successfully demonstrated that a fleet of autonomous robots can track and study a moving microbial community in an open-ocean eddy. The results of this research effort were recently published in Science Robotics.
Edward DeLong and David Karl, oceanography professors in UH Mānoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and co-authors of the study, have been researching open-ocean microbes for decades using research vessels, buoys, satellite observations, automatic samplers and on-shore laboratories.
Autonomous robotic fleets enable researchers to observe complex systems in ways that are otherwise impossible with purely ship-based or remote sensing techniques.
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