the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) used a piece of software called “T rex”, which operates in a similar way to the software used to control Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rovers – helping them to avoid obstacles on the surface of the Red Planet.

One main difference between the two pieces of software is that for the Mars rovers, the software ran in the control centre on Earth. With this marine vehicle, it runs onboard the robotic vehicle.
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“We tell it, ‘here’s the range of tasks that we want you to perform’, and it goes off and assesses what is happening in the ocean, making decisions about how much of the range it will cover to get back the data we want.”

Researchers at MBARI used the Gulper AUV to monitor potentially harmful algal blooms.

Kim Fulton-Bennett from MBARI explained: “We used to send out a ship for a full day every few weeks to manually take these measurements. Now we just take the AUV outside the harbour and send it on its way.

“About 24 hours later, it comes back, we hoist it on board, and download the data.”