Navy’s Underwater Bots Not Likely To Outperform Dolphins Anytime Soon
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 25 of June , 2009 at 3:57 am
The Navy has a few different programs in the works when it comes to detecting mines underwater, a tedious and inefficient process when done by humans in boats. For a while now, they’ve been using trained dolphins to sniff ping out mines, with a reasonable amount of success… The picture above shows a Navy dolphin about to place a marker on a training mine. The problem is that dolphins require constant attention and supervision and mackerel, and certain people are (somewhat understandably, I suppose) upset that dolphins are being tasked with this sort of thing. So obviously, it would be great if the Navy could just get some robots to take care of the whole business.
Yes, it would be great, but it’s turning out to be tougher than it might seem. You can blame the dolphins for that: they made the job look easy. Robots, on the other hand, have some issues when it comes to differentiating mines from other things, say for example, the rest of the ocean. The solution that several research groups are working on is not to make smarter robots per say, but rather to make dumb robots that are capable of teaching themselves. After all, you can spend a whole bunch of time and effort programming a robot to do one specific task, or you can spend a whole bunch of time and effort programming a robot to learn how to do many specific tasks all by itself. It’s a much more efficient way to go, and it means that the dolphins can go back to molesting UAVs and toying with Pleo.
VIA [ Danger Room ]
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