This UD marine researcher is on the cutting edge of underwater robots

Forget airborne drones: Mark Moline, director of the School of Marine Science and Policy at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean and Environment, recently co-authored a cutting-edge study about autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), according to a story from ScienceDaily.
AUVs are programmable robots that can study the ocean and its environment on its own underwater. Scientists have had problems with AUVs in the past because the data they pick up often takes too much time to offer important real-time information.
But Moline’s paper says using multi-sensor systems on an AUV to allow it to synthesize sound data in real time, so it can make decisions about what to do next, is a game-changer.
“Underwater robots can be programmed to make independent decisions,” the ScienceDaily headline declares.

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He and Kelly Benoit-Bird, from Oregon State University, got the idea when they were investigating whether food sources like fish, krill and squid attract whales to the Tongue of the Ocean, an ocean trench separating the Andros and New Providence islands in the Bahamas, ScienceDaily reported.
They tried programming a REMUS600 AUV to independently make decisions on its movements — and record its location — based on sonar data of marine life, like the size of a nearby squid.
“Imagine what else could we learn if the vehicle was constantly triggering new missions based on real-time information,” Moline told ScienceDaily.