Droids, drones, and driverless technologies are fueling a supply chain revolution.

Social distancing is a new fact of life for most, but not long-ago technical conferences brought experts together. In early February, Underwater Intervention provided a series of presentations on developments in untethered vehicles. A powerful trend was the increasing level of "autonomy" found in the sector. While not all the presentations addressed this theme, several helped clarify the many ways this "buzzword" is advancing the capabilities of untethered marine vehicles. Kongsberg Maritime offered two presentations: "How Autonomous is Your AUV" presented by Richard Mills and "Autonomous Technology for Ocean Exploration," by Arnt Olsen.

Gard's mission is: Together we enable sustainable maritime development. To deliver on this mission, we explore and support the development of emerging technologies including maritime autonomous surface ships. The Nordic countries are leading the way in this area and we are proud to be collaborating with Yara International (Yara) and their newly established company Yara Birkeland AS that is developing the well-known Norwegian autonomous logistics project, YARA BIRKELAND. Construction of the zero-emission autonomous containership has already begun. When the ship enters service in early 2020, she will be operated by onboard crew while the autonomous systems are being tested and certified safe.

No one expected the Loch Ness expedition to actually find anything. Scotland's famous highland lake is as known for its mythical monster'Nessie' as it is for continuous, failed attempts to prove that monster's existence. That hasn't stopped people from searching, so The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland worked with Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime to survey the lakebed with an underwater robot. And then they found Nessie. At least, they found a prop of Nessie.

The good news: The Loch Ness Monster has been captured on sonar by an underwater robot operated by the British division of Norway's Kongsberg Maritime. The bad news: "Nessie" is a prop from a Sherlock Holmes film that sank in the loch in 1969. The monstrous model was long thought lost until it was discovered this week by the Munin Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) as part of an underwater survey of the loch for The Loch Ness Project and VisitScotland. There have been sporadic sightings of what is purported to be the Loch Ness Monster since the first recorded encounter by St Columba in 565 AD. After a supposed photograph was taken in 1933, public interest in some sort of large, dinosaur-like creature making its home in the Highlands skyrocketed, and in the decades since the loch has been subjected to sonar scans, submersible hunts, hydrophone surveys, and enough photographs taken above and below the surface to wallpaper the Grand Canyon.

Fast-forward to 2016 and Kongsberg Maritime, a specialist in underwater positioning technology, has rediscovered the prop. The company was scanning with MUNIN, one of its many autonomous underwater robots, when it recorded an image of the 10 meter long replica. MUNIN uses a variety of sonar and camera equipment to produce high-resolution datasets at a depth of up to 1,500 meters. "Nessie" came up in one of its scans and Adrian Shine, who leads The Loch Ness Project, was able to confirm that it's the prop from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. "We can confidently say this is the model because of where it was found, the shape -- there is the neck and no humps -- and from the measurements," he told BBC News.