Drones Sail Out to Sea

While Amazon works out its idea for using drones as package delivery devices, the unmanned vehicles can still find work in many scientific applications. In the air, drones have monitored crops and forest fires and explored archaeological sites. Now, they are going down to the sea. A Rutgers University scientist headed an experiment called Gliderpalooza, outfitting 15 submersible drones with instruments to monitor everything from deep-water currents to water temperatures to fish migrations in the Atlantic ocean. The drones provide unprecedented environmental data, giving researchers a much clearer and more integrated picture of the ocean than can be provided by ocean-observing infrared satellites and stationary buoys.

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