Curious bot roves ocean to find the new and unusual

摘要

Most of the ocean is empty, but it's also home to sharks, shipwrecks and strange undersea creatures. How's a robot to find the good stuff? Yogesh Girdhar of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts is giving bots a sense of curiosity. He wants them to be able to filter out common features, and focus on the remarkable. Girdhar's curiosity software (Autonomous Robots, doi.org/744) starts running as soon as a robot is dropped into a new place. It starts with little information about how the world looks, but slowly makes sense of what it sees by searching for patterns in the data. In the ocean, these come from things such as sand, kelp or fish.