TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Joe Wolfel, co-CEO of Terradepth, about the company's ocean data-collection robot. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Karen Roby: I think this is a good way to summarize that what you guys are doing and are working toward is a fleet of fully autonomous deep ocean data collection submarines. Tell us a little bit about how this came about? I mean, you don't just wake up one day and say, yeah this is what I think I'm going to do.

So this was all good - but again still quite preliminary. This is also what the reviewers and the editor thought when we first submitted the manuscript. They were right, of course. To make this study more relevant we needed a more general approach and a tighter connection to clinical practice. Stimulated by the reviewers' comments we took a closer look at clinically significant scenarios.