This intrepid robot is the Wall-E of the deep sea

Enlarge / With extra-wide tracks and a bunch of other clever features, the Benthic Rover II can roam the seafloor for years at a time. (credit: Madison Pobis | MBARI)

The Benthic Rover II is the size of a compact car, although it rocks fat treads, making it more like a scientific tank. That, along with the two googly-eye-like flotation devices on its front, gives it a sort of WALL-E vibe. Only instead of exploring a garbage-strewn landscape, BR-II roams the Pacific seafloor, 13,000 feet deep. The robot's mission: to prowl the squishy terrain in search of clues about how the deep ocean processes carbon.

That mission begins with a wild ride, 180 miles off the coast of Southern California. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute lower BR-II into the water and then ... drop it. Completely untethered, the robot free-falls for two and a half hours, landing on the abyssal plains-great stretches of what you might generously call muck. It's mushy and dusty at the same time," says MBARI electrical engineer Alana Sherman, coauthor on a new paper in Science Robotics describing findings from the robot's adventures. Which is part of the reason it's a tracked vehicle, and it has these really wide treads." That extra surface area distributes the robot's weight so it doesn't sink into the sand.

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