Underwater exploration has never been a cheap endeavor. Aside from a submarine or an underwater rover, your options for unlocking the secrets of the deep are rather limited. Two companies are working to change that by creating compact, affordable underwater robots. The first is O-Robotix, the maker of Seadrone, which takes concepts from aerial drones and modifies them for use under water. The 10.5-by-12 inch Seadrone is compact enough to carry in your hand and has a gimbal-mounted HD camera that streams live video directly to a tablet. You can control the drone via the tablet interface or a joystick.

SeaDrone, the underwater robot coming out of a new company founded by two Stanford AI lab veterans, is aiming to make fish farming a lot easier--particularly for smaller aquaculture operations--by making underwater inspection cheaper and easier. The ocean ROV's story is not an unusual one for Silicon Valley: two Stanford students meet over a lab bench, get an idea that something they'd been tinkering around with for themselves could be turned into a product and the basis of a company. It's a story Silicon Valley loves. Eduardo Moreno met Shuyun Chung in the Stanford AI lab in 2013. Moreno, in the thick of his studies for a master's degree in mechanical engineering, was working on underwater robot hardware in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

SeaDrone, the underwater robot coming out of a new company founded by two Stanford AI lab veterans, is aiming to make fish farming a lot easier--particularly for smaller aquaculture operations--by making underwater inspection cheaper and easier. The ocean ROV's story is not an unusual one for Silicon Valley: two Stanford students meet over a lab bench, get an idea that something they'd been tinkering around with for their themselves could be turned into a product and the basis of a company. It's a story Silicon Valley loves. Eduardo Moreno met Shuyun Chung in the Stanford AI lab in 2013. Moreno, in the thick of his studies for a master's degree in mechanical engineering, was working on underwater robot hardware in collaboration with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.