MIT's New Underwater Robot Can Plan Its Own Missions

Very soon, there would be a robot that can plan and execute its mission in deep oceans. Developed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the robot has its own "cognitive" capabilities.

When deploying autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), much of an engineer's time is spent writing scripts or low-level commands in order to direct a robot to carry out a mission plan.

The new programming approach developed by MIT engineers enables robots perform high-level decision-making to figure out how to achieve these goals.

For example, an engineer may give a robot a list of goal locations to explore, along with any time constraints, as well as physical directions, such as staying a certain distance above the sea-floor.

Using the system devised by the MIT team, the robot can then plan out a mission, choosing which locations to explore, in what order, within a given time-frame.

If an unforeseen event prevents the robot from completing a task, it can choose to drop that task, or reconfigure the hardware to recover from a failure, on the fly.

"These vehicles could plan their own missions, and execute, adapt, and re-plan them alone, without human support," said principal developer Brian Williams.

By giving robots control of higher-level decision-making would free engineers to think about overall strategy. Such a system could also reduce the size of the operational team needed on research cruises, he added.

"If you look at the ocean right now, we can use Earth-orbiting satellites, but they don't penetrate much below the surface," Williams said.

"You could send sea vessels which send one autonomous vehicle, but that doesn't show you a lot. This technology can offer a whole new way to observe the ocean, which is exciting," he added in a report appeared in the MIT Technology Review.