Stanford's Humanoid Diving Robot Takes on Undersea Archaeology and Coral Reefs

If you were in the audience for Oussama Khatib's IROS keynote in Hamburg last year, you may remember him talking about this crazy thing: We, of course, cornered Oussama immediately afterwards, because humanoid robotic submarine what?! It turned out that OceanOne, as it was called, was involved in a top secret (or something) project in collaboration with the French, which has (now that it's over and wasn't a disaster) been un-topsecretified so we can finally, finally tell you about it. Originally, OceanOne was not an archaeological robot--it was conceptualized by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia as a way of monitoring deep coral reefs in the Red Sea. Christian Voolstra, assistant professor of marine science at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center, explained where the idea came from in an interview last year: Currently people use a so-called ROV (remote operated vehicle), which is a little submarine with two robotic arms and very limited dexterity. Using the ROV to examine delicate coral colonies proved to be troublesome.