A UK boat has just provided an impressive demonstration of the future of robotic maritime operations. The 12m-long Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) Maxlimer has completed a 22-day-long mission to map an area of seafloor in the Atlantic. SEA-KIT International, which developed the craft, "skippered" the entire outing via satellite from its base in Tollesbury in eastern England. The mission was part-funded by the European Space Agency. Robot boats promise a dramatic change in the way we work at sea. Already, many of the big survey companies that run traditional crewed vessels have started to invest heavily in the new, remotely operated technologies.

Australia is deploying a fleet of uncrewed robot boats to patrol its waters and monitor weather and wildlife. They will also flag boats potentially transporting asylum seekers, a plan that has concerned human rights groups. The 5-metre-long vessels, known as Bluebottles after an Australian jellyfish, look like miniature sailing yachts. They use a combination of wind, wave and solar power to maintain a steady 5-knot speed in all conditions. Sydney-based Ocius Technology delivered the prototype in 2017 and Australia's Ministry of Defence has now awarded an AU$5.5 million (£3m) …

The maritime and scientific communities have set themselves the ambitious target of 2030 to map Earth's entire ocean floor. You can argue about the numbers but it's in the region of 80% of the global seafloor that's either completely unknown or has had no modern measurement applied to it. The international GEBCO 2030 project was set up to close the data gap and has announced a number of initiatives to get it done. What's clear, however, is that much of this work will have to leverage new technologies or at the very least max the existing ones. Which makes the news from Ocean Infinity - that it's creating a fleet of ocean-going robots - all the more interesting. US-based OI is a relatively new exploration and survey company.

Engineers are harnessing'swarm robotics' to teach intelligent robots how to cooperate during naval missions. The researchers in Portugal have demonstrated how a small fleet of self-learning robot boats can'think' for themselves, to work together on surveillance and other missions. Each robot is made from materials costing roughly $330, and operates with a neural network to create individual behaviours similar to those in a flock of birds. Engineers are harnessing'swarm robotics' to teach intelligent robots how to cooperate during naval missions. The researchers in Portugal have demonstrated how a small fleet of self-learning robot boats can'think' for themselves, to work together The robotic swarms work like a school of fish, or flock of birds.

I repeat: SpaceX has landed a freaking rocket on a robot boat in the dark. Defying its own predictions, the Hawthorne-based commercial spaceflight company has safely brought a Falcon 9 from the edge of space--where it was traveling at nearly six times the speed of sound--to a stationary platform floating several hundred miles off the coast of Florida. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was skeptical this was possible, because the rocket's payload, a communications satellite, was heading to an orbital altitude of 22,300 feet. Which means the rocket would be coming home very, very hot. "It wants to melt," he said at an earlier press event.

It is the first company--the first anybody to send a rocket to space and then land it on a floating barge. Sixth time is the charm, apparently. Or at least, anyone with an interest in low cost access to space hopes it will. At 4:43pm ET, the nine engines on board the Falcon 9's stage 1 rocket began pushing 1.53 million pounds of thrust against Earth. After about two and a half minutes, and several hundred thousand feet of elevation gain, the first stage detached and began a controlled fall back to Earth, arcing towards the football field-sized barge (charmingly-named "Of Course I Still Love You") in the Atlantic Ocean.