In a demonstration conducted this fall in the lower Chesapeake Bay, a fleet of small, human-free boats collectively patrolled a harbor, detected intruders, and even chased them away from the area they were protecting ... The new exercise highlighted the progress the vessels have made: expanding their coverage area, collaborating on strategy, improving tactical maneuvering, and getting better at spotting hostile parties.

Autonomous vehicles have infiltrated much of the military, from airborne surveillance to all manner of ground-based operations. But the Navy remains a mostly human-controlled operation--with the demand for robotic tech focused on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it simply hasn't trickled down to aquatic operations yet. But the Office of Naval Research thinks autonomous boats can have a major impact on the military's ocean-going efficiency and effectiveness. In a demonstration conducted this fall in the lower Chesapeake Bay, a fleet of small, human-free boats collectively patrolled a harbor, detected intruders, and even chased them away from the area they were protecting. The Navy first demonstrated the swarm in 2014, when the vessels were tasked with protecting a single ship.

Just as Skype revolutionized the way we communicate, and TransferWise found a way to break worn patterns in the financial world, Estonia is about to make a transforming difference in the dynamic field of robotics too. Besides the country being a Mecca for data and tech-driven startups, more and more Estonians, in addition to excelling in code writing and software development, are thrusting their hands deep into the wiring and metal of robots. Imagine a vacuum-cleaner-sized, yellow'turtle' diving elegantly down hundreds of metres to probe ship wrecks, thus gathering valuable data for archaeologists and maybe even finding lost treasures buried somewhere deep under the sea. But this intelligent'turtle' is actually a robot. Equipped with a camera and a searchlight, the relatively cheap and highly manoeuvrable U-CAT (Underwater Curious Archaeology Turtle) locomotion principle is similar to that of the sea turtles of the natural world.

In February MIT Technology Review highlighted 10 breakthrough technologies poised to significantly change the world over the next few years. Here's how they have progressed since then. We predicted that 2016 would bring major progress on high-tech cancer cures enabled by using gene editing to tune the human immune system, and it did. First, American scientists got a green light to start using the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to customize T cells and turn them into cancer killers. That study turned out to have the backing of Internet billionaire Sean Parker, who in April had announced he'd give away $250 million toward "hacking" the immune system. By November, a Chinese company announced it had raced ahead and dosed a patient with the first T cells edited with CRISPR.

Most of the important archaeological sites in Central America were "discovered" by archaeologists who, in fact, didn't discover them at all but were led to the ruins by local people. I've known several Maya archaeologists who routinely started fieldwork in a new area by heading into a dive bar and hoisting beers with the locals while listening to various bullshitters spin tales about ruins they'd seen in the jungle; once in a while, a story would turn out to be true. But, because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted. The revelation of an ancient city in a valley in the Mosquitia mountains, of Honduras, one of the last scientifically unexplored regions on Earth, was a different story. This was the first time a large archaeological site had been discovered in a purely speculative search using a technology called LIDAR, or "light detection and ranging," which can map terrain through the thickest jungle foliage, an event I chronicled in a story for the magazine in 2013.

A number of high-profile missions lifted off, others reached their destinations after long journeys through deep space, and a few, sadly, crashed and burned. Some of the most exciting spaceflight action of 2016 involved rockets coming down rather than going up. California-based company SpaceX managed to land the first stage of five different Falcon 9 rockets during operational orbital launches this year; one of the boosters touched down back at the launch pad, whereas the other four landed on robotic "drone ships" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. And the Washington-based company Blue Origin launched and landed the same suborbital New Shepard rocket four times this year, finally retiring the booster after a successful October test flight . Both SpaceX and Blue Origin -- which are headed by billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respectively -- aim to develop fully reusable rockets as a way to slash the cost of spaceflight and open up the heavens to exploration.

MOSCOW – Search teams on Wednesday recovered another flight recorder from a military plane that crashed in the Black Sea, killing all 92 aboard, the Defense Ministry said. The first flight recorder was found the previous day and experts have started analyzing its data to determine the cause of the crash. The Tu-154 of the Russian Defense Ministry crashed into the sea early Sunday, two minutes after taking off in good weather from the city of Sochi. It was carrying members of the Alexandrov Ensemble, widely known as the Red Army Choir, to a New Year's concert at a Russian military base in Syria. The Defense Ministry said 15 bodies and 239 body fragments have been recovered from the crash site. It previously said 17 bodies had been found.

You might not expect an oceanographer to be high on NASA's speed dial, but when the space agency needed help mounting a mission to Jupiter's ice-covered moon Europa, it called one: Chris German. Ever since the geochemist found hydrothermal vents teeming with life in the Atlantic Ocean in 1997, he's been an Indiana Jones in the search for vents, creatures, and the origins of life. A senior scientist at Woods Hole, German was among the first to use programmable underwater robots to explore the seafloor. The skill to operate them in difficult conditions--15,000 feet deep and under 10-foot-thick ice--is what NASA likes about him. Last September, they teamed up for a two-month Arctic expedition, a dry run for what NASA might one day try on Europa.

Back in April, Stanford University professor Oussama Khatib led a team of researchers on an underwater archaeological expedition, 30 kilometers off the southern coast of France, to La Lune, King Louis XIV's sunken 17th-century flagship. Rather than dive to the site of the wreck 100 meters below the surface, which is a very bad idea for almost everyone, Khatib's team brought along a custom-made humanoid submarine robot called Ocean One. In this month's issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, the Stanford researchers describe in detail how they designed and built the robot, a hybrid between a humanoid and an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and also how they managed to send it down to the resting place of La Lune, where it used its three-fingered hands to retrieve a vase. Most ocean-ready ROVs are boxy little submarines that might have an arm on them if you're lucky, but they're not really designed for the kind of fine manipulation that underwater archaeology demands. You could send down a human diver instead, but once you get past about 40 meters, things start to get both complicated and dangerous.

Drone boats belonging to the U.S. Navy have begun learning to work together like a swarm with a shared hive mind. Two years ago, they would have individually reacted to possible threats by all swarming over like a chaotic group of kids learning to play soccer for the first time. Now the drone boats have showed that they can cooperate intelligently as a team to defend a harbor area against intruders. The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) held its latest robot swarm demonstration in the lower Chesapeake Bay off the Virginia coast for about a month. Four drone boats showed off their improved control and navigation software by patrolling an area of 4 nautical miles by 4 nautical miles. If they spotted a possible threat, the swarm of roboboats would collectively decide which of them would go track and trail the intruder vessel.