A robot created at Stanford University is diving down to shipwrecks and sunken planes in a way that humans can't.
OceanOneK resembles a human diver from the front, with arms and hands and eyes that have 3D vision, capturing the underwater world in full color.
Stanford University roboticist Oussama Khatib and his students teamed up with deep-sea archaeologists and began sending the robot on dives in September. The team just finished another underwater expedition in July. OceanOne made its debut in 2016, exploring King Louis XIV's wrecked flagship La Lune, which sits 328 feet below the Mediterranean 20 miles off southern France. The 1664 shipwreck remained untouched by humans.
While OceanOne was designed to reach maximum depths of 656 feet, researchers had a new goal: 1 kilometer, hence the new name for OceanOneK. The team used Stanford's recreation pool to test out the robot and run through experiments, such as carrying a video camera on a boom and collecting objects. Then came the ultimate test for OceanOneK.A Mediterranean tour that began in 2021 saw OceanOneK diving to these successive depths: 406 feet to the submarine, 1,095 feet to the Roman ship remains and ultimately 0.5 miles to prove it has the capability of diving to nearly 1 kilometer. But it wasn't without problems.
They were able to pull in the slack, and OceanOneK's descent was a success. It dropped off a commemorative marker on the seabed that reads,"A robot's first touch of the deep seafloor / A vast new world for humans to explore."