Last month, the entire world was abuzz when five über wealthy explorers perished at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean near the grave of the once "unsinkable ship." Disturbingly, during the same week, hundreds of war-torn refugees drowned in the Mediterranean with little news of their plight. The irony of machine versus nature illustrates how tiny humans are in the universe, and that every soul rich or poor is precious. It is with this attitude that many roboticists have been tackling some of the hardest problems in the galaxy from space exploration to desert mining to oceanography to search & rescue. Following the news of the implosion of the Titan submersible, I reached out to Professor F. Javier Diez of Rutgers University for his comment on the rescue mission and the role of robots.

On May 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer will depart from Port Canaveral in Florida on a two-week expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration, featuring the technology demonstration of an autonomous underwater vehicle. Called Orpheus, this new class of submersible robot will showcase a system that will help it find its way and identify interesting scientific features on the seafloor. Terrain-relative navigation was instrumental in helping NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance Mars rover make its precision touch down on the Red Planet on Feb. 18. The system allowed the descending robot to visually map the Martian landscape, identify hazards, and then choose a safe place to land without human assistance. In a similar way, the agency's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter uses a vision-based navigation system to track surface features on the ground during flight in order to estimate its movements across the Martian surface.