The “Gulper AUV” is an underwater vehicle that is programmed to look for information of use to the scientific community.

Gulper AUV Sub-Aquatic Robot

The group explains that it has ‘trained’ the robot to retrieve the highest-quality information back to them.

“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.” says Dr Maughan of MBARI.

The Gulper AUV is used to help scientists keep tabs on various algae. In particular, these scientists are keeping watch for algae blooms that could means problems for the ecosystem.

It used to be the case that a ship would be sent out for a whole day every few weeks to retrieve the kind of information that the Gulper AUV can nab in one of its trips. They just take it out to the harbor, and away it goes on its mission. Around twenty-four hours later, it comes back, they hoist it away, and analyze the results.

The biggest flag to go off in my mind is that this must require some interesting exploration and path planning algorithms to deal with an undersea environment. Taking a look at MBARI’s website, the Gulper AUV is equipped with four sonar that operate simultaneously to provide a fantastic map of the sea floor in high resolution.

The multibeam sonar produces high-resolution bathymetry (analogous to topography on land), the sidescan sonars produce imagery based on the intensity of the sound energy’s reflections, and the subbottom profiler penetrates sediments on the seafloor, allowing the detection of layers within the sediments, faults, and depth to the basement rock. All components are rated to 6000 m depth. The vehicle is launched on programmed missions and runs on its own battery power until it returns to the ship, as programmed, for recovery – MBARI AUV Mapping Page

Head over to the article at BBC to hear an audio snippet about the Gulper AUV. it’s about halfway down the page. If you think that’s cool, then you’d also better head over to the AUV’s home page at MBARI to check out the technical goods.

It’s time once again to give away some cool robot prizes to celebrate the 10th birthday of GoRobotics! If you didn’t win last month’s contest, have no fear, try again this month (and the month after!). We have some great robot prizes from our sponsors, SuperDroid Robots, Apress, and Pololu.

There are three ways of entering this month’s contest:

1. Simply comment on this post and tell us why you should win.
2. Follow GoRobotics on Twitter and leave a comment below telling us your Twitter username.
3. Retweet the following, “Enter @GoRobotics.net’s 10 Year Birthday Robot Giveaway http://wp.me/pgDpL-kM“. Leave a comment when you do.

YOU CAN DO ALL THREE (three comments) TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING!

Winners will be chosen at random. Three winners will be chosen and the first winners will get his/her choice of the prizes, second place gets second choice and third place gets whatever is left over! The contest ends FEBRUARY 28th, 2010 at 12AM EST. Comments are moderated to prevent spam. Your comment won’t show up till the moderator has approved it. Here are this month’s prizes:

1st Place Prize – Parallax Penguin Robot worth $200 USD.

The Penguin Robot by Parallax is a unique walking robot. Using two micro servos and precisely CNC machined parts, the robot can walk via a “tilt-stride action” gait. The cute little penguin comes equipped with a digital compass to track its heading, two photoresistors for sensing ambient light and light tracking, and two infrared emitters and a detector for obstacle avoidance. The Penguin Robot comes with a 7-segment LED indicator and a piezo buzzer for making sound. This is a great kit for getting into robotics, and you should set aside about 4 hours to assemble him.

2nd Place Prize – Build Your Own CNC Machine, Extreme NXT, and LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0: The Kings Treasure (donated by Apress) worth $75 USD

The second place prize is a whole raft of excellent books from Apress.

Build Your Own CNC Machine is the book to get you started in fabricating your own parts. CNC expert Patrick Hood-Daniel and best-selling author James Kelly team up to show you how to construct your very own CNC machine for about $500 – $1000 USD. Then they go on to show you how to use it, how to document your designs in Computer-Aided Design programs, and how to output your designs as specifications and tool paths that feed into the CNC machine, controlling it as it builds whatever parts your imagination can dream up.

Extreme NXT shows you how to advance the NXT with more than 45 exciting projects that include creating a cool magic wand that writes words in thin air, building a remotely guided vehicle, and constructing sophisticated robots that can sense color, light, temperature, and more. All projects are explained with easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions, so you’ll be able to create them successfully whether you’re a novice or an expert. This book also shows you how to expand the programming software and use the alternative language NXC.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0: The King’s Treasure is written for children ages 10 and up who want to learn to design, build, and operate robots using LEGO’s immensely popular MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 robotics kit. The book leads readers through a series of five projects centered on an engaging story line. It can be read by kids alone, or it can provide the spark for a wonderful series of parent/child activities.

3rd Place Prize – 2x 24V 195 RPM Gear Motors (donated by Super Droid Robots) worth $40 USD

These powerful 24V motors donated by Super Droid Robots will kick-start your next robot project. They are high-quality motors with steel gears (not cheap plastic), and used in Super Droid’s All-terrain robots. They use a 1:27 gear reduction and have an amazing 12 kgf-cm of torque. That means they could lift a 26 lb (12 kg) load using a 1 cm lever arm! They are rated for < 250 mA of drive current. Get started building something cool!

Update: Congratulations to our winners, Gerry Blondeaux, Dalton Caughell, and Matt Thouvenot.

Rules/Regulations/Fine Print:

• To enter the contest, you must comment on this post.
• Giveaway ends February 28th, at 12AM EST (9PM PST)
• One prize package per winner.
• No purchase is necessary to enter the contest it’s free!>
• Everyone is eligible, but shipping is free to only those in the Continental US: if you are outside this area, you will have to pay for shipping.
• PayPal is required to pay for shipping if you live out of the Continental US
• Winners will be contacted via email supplied in the comment form.
• You have 48 hrs to respond to the email and choose your prize package.
• GoRobotics.net makes NO WARRANTY or GUARANTEES about these prizes.
• GoRobotics.net can change the rules WHENEVER IT WANTS.

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Russian gas company Gazprom wants to build an oil pipeline from Vyborg, Russia to Greifswald, Germany. The pipeline will supply 26 million homes with natural gas for heating. There’s one big problem though – the pipeline runs over the Baltic Sea-floor which is still covered by up to 150,000 unexploded mines placed there during World War II. In order to allow the $10 billion USD project to continue, Bactec International has been hired to build an underwater robot to find and detonate the unexploded ordinances that lie in the path of the pipeline.

The robot, which will help perform the biggest commercial mine-clearance project ever, will locate approximately 70 mines, each filled with over 600 lbs of explosives. Once the exact location of each mine is determined, a support ship will warn any others ships in the area to leave, monitor for marine animals in the area, and the robot will maneuver a smaller (10 lbs) detonation charge near the unexploded ordinance. Once all ships, the robot, and any marine animals are clear of the area, the mine is destroyed and the robot will return to recover the remains of the bomb.

[Via Slashdot]

Matt Bunting’s story should be inspiring to anyone out there who builds robots. You see, Matt was just your average robot builder (well, maybe above average), until Intel (yes, that Intel) spotted one of his creations and decided they wanted to use it as a showcase item for their latest push into embedded Atom processors. Bunting’s hexapod robot, or the Intel Hexapod now, is now a bit of a celebrity and tours around the country with Intel strutting its six-legged stuff.

Keep reading for the rest of the story.

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Hey loyal readers, I need your help. You may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here for a while – a long while, actually. The reason for this is that I’ve been working on another robotics project, and I need your help testing it out.  The project is a new robotics website called RobotBox. It’s a cross between a community website and portfolio for robot builders. RobotBox rose from the ashes of, the now defunct, Robot Directory, but is much much better.

RobotBox lets you showcase your robotic creations to the world. It’s designed to inspire new (and old) robot builders by giving them neat creations to check out. There are already quite a few robots on the site, and I’d love it if you added yours. Registration is super simple, and you can then upload your robot projects.

The site is still a work-in-progress, so here’s what I need from you – feedback! I want to know what you like, what you don’t like, and what features you want to see added. Basically I want to know if the site is useful, and what I can do to make it better.

You can leave comments below, use twitter, or email. Thanks!