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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the somebody-will-find-oil dept.

The latest X Prize challenges teams to explore the sea floor using autonomous, untethered robots:

There is a new X Prize to accelerate technologies to explore the ocean. Shell is sponsoring the competition, which will challenge teams to map a 4km-deep, 500-sq-km area of sea floor using autonomous robots. The award, which is valued at $7m (£4.6m), will have to be claimed before the end of 2018. Previous ocean incentives put up by the X Prize organisation have helped develop oil clean-up solutions and sensors to monitor ocean acidification.

[...] X Prize technical director Dr Jyotika Virmani said much remained to be discovered about our planet. "It was a Caribbean sponge that gave us AZT, the compound used in AIDS treatments. There are many more medical benefits just waiting to be discovered, but we have no idea because the oceans remain largely unexplored," she told BBC News.

Although technologies already exist to survey the seabed at 4,000m down, the particular rules of the Shell Ocean Discovery competition will make even current experts in the field scratch their heads. The entrants will have to deploy their solutions from land or from the air; they cannot use a ship or even be in the survey area at the time. So, no cable can be used to remotely operate vehicles; they will need to be fully autonomous. There will be two rounds to the competition. The first, to be held in 2017, will be undertaken at a shallower depth of 2,000m, and require teams to make a bathymetric map of at least 20% of a 500-sq-km zone of seabed in roughly 6-8 hours.

The top 10 teams will then go forward to the second round, which will be held at the full competition depth of 4,000m. At least 50% of this area will have to be mapped in 12-15 hours. A scanning resolution of 5m per pixel is demanded. The teams will have to return high-resolution pictures from the deep as well, of a target specified by the organisers. Control and communications in the dark at 4,000m will be tough enough, never mind the consideration of pressure, which will be about 40 megapascals - nearly 6,000 pounds per square inch.

[...] There will be a separate bonus prize of $1m to go to the team that can demonstrate new chemical and biological underwater sensors. They will have to "sniff" a target to its source in the survey zone. That prize is sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

The tagline: 95% of the ocean is unexplored. The sponsor: Shell.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:24PM (#276789)

    Just wow.