This tiny AI-powered robot is learning to explore the ocean on its own

The ocean is big, and our attempts to understand it are still largely surface-deep. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, around 80 percent of the big blue is "unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored." Ships are the primary way to collect information about the seas, but they're costly to send out frequently. More recently, robotic buoys called Argo floats have been drifting with the currents, diving up and down to take a variety of measurements at depths up to 6,500 feet. But new aquatic robots from a lab at Caltech could rove deeper and take on more tailored underwater missions.