The adventures of Boaty McBoatface

Boaty McBoatface, an autonomous underwater vehicle, is one of a fleet of robots cared for by Maaten Furlong at the National Oceanography Centre. He explained to Chris Smith what exactly Boaty McBoatface is, and what it looks like...

Maaten - Well Chris, it's a little yellow submarine. It's about 3.5 meters long, weighs about 750 kilos. It's got a propeller at the back and some control planes. It's also got little stubby wings, which allows it to go up and down through the water column. It's designed to go a really long way. Thousands of kilometres and many months of endurance, but its primary purpose is actually just to carry sensors. We view these things as sensor taxis, and you can fit whatever sensors you need for a specific size campaign that the vehicle is working on.

Chris - Thousands of kilometers? That's a lot. How is it powered?

Maaten电池powered. It has a whole set of lithium batteries, which are single use batteries, alongside some rechargeable sets in there as well. It goes very slowly, so it doesn't use very much energy for propulsion, and we run low power sensors there. But it has a very big battery pack. It's got the same amount of energy that you'd get in a for example a Nissan Leaf.

克里斯,所以对于这样的水下机器人,what is their main aim? Why have you got them?

Maaten - They're a generic tool for supporting the oceanographic community. There's a whole fleet of different Marine robots, which we run at the Oceanography Centre. Boaty is just one. They're used to carry sensors to different parts of the ocean, to understand what's happening in that specific location. Whereas on terrestrial plains, you can use satellites to get huge areas and visualize huge areas of the globe. However because of the properties of seawater, you have to move your sensors to the specific location you want to measure. All of these vehicles are there to take measurements of the ocean, and it depends on the sort of science which is being undertaken. Some of it is looking at the structure of the water column, others looking at actually what's happening on the sea bed and the geology, and other things are looking at the biology that's there. Whether it's big marine animals or whether you're looking in the deep ocean and you're looking at some of the creatures which are on the bottom of the abyssal plane 4,000 meters down.

Chris - Do they follow a pre-programmed mission, or do they actually make decisions for themselves?

Maaten - This depends on the vehicles. Generally they will follow a pre-programmed mission. For example, Boaty is designed to go a very long way, but what it's actually composed of is a lot of short little missions. We will tell it to go and do a little mission. It will dive down, it'll go and do a survey, it'll come to the surface and then it'll talk to us via satellite and ask us what we want it to do next. You can stitch all of these little missions together, but during the actual mission it's operating completely independently. It will be taking measurements of its environment to try and avoid bumping into things and make sure it doesn't get lost. And then it'll come back to the surface. Other vehicles that we have are less autonomous. You have remotely operated vehicles and these are controlled from a ship typically down a long cable to a robot, which is on the bottom end of a wire. People are also looking at surface vessels and these are uncrewed surface vessels and they would be controlled from shore typically. There were people working on the situations where you'll have a control station running an uncrewed surface vessel somewhere in the ocean, and then that will be deploying an a R.O.V. that you can control remotely from shore. You will see what's happening at the bottom of the ocean and be able to manipulate the bottom of the ocean, thousands of kilometers from shore, remotely from a shore station.

Chris - What can we do with these things though that we couldn't do before? Do they actually unlock new realms to us or for us, or is it just a question of whether it's more practical to operate this way?

Maaten - They have some unique capabilities. You mentioned Boaty being in Antarctica, so it's currently on a campaign to look at the Thwaites Glacier and it will be going 10's of kilometers in from the ice front. There's a big ice glacier floating on the Antarctic sea and Boaty will go from the front of the ice, 20, 30, 40 kilometers in, to study what's happening underneath it. You could do that with a manned submarine, but it'd be incredibly dangerous and incredibly expensive. Also there are other systems. There's an array of robotic floats in the ocean. These measure the structure of the ocean and the deep ocean and there's 4,000 of them sending back data which allows you to run ocean models and predict impacts of climate change. You could technically do this with ships, but it's just so much more efficient to do it with robots.

Chris - It's good to hear there are all those advantages. We're pushing the boundaries and boldly going where no unmanned autonomous vehicle has been before. Maaten thank you very much, indeed, for telling us all about it. That's Maaten Furlong, who is the caretaker for Boaty McBoatface, among others.