Liquid Robotics Lures BP, Navy, NOAA With Wave-Powered Glider

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL) in Seattle, which has an annual budget of around $40 million, has monitored the seas using sensors on buoys and boats for nearly 40 years, a process lead engineer Christian Meinig describes as slow and expensive. So five years ago, when Meinig learned about the Wave Glider, a robotic ocean-monitoring device that can go anywhere on the sea for a year without recharging its battery, he wanted the lab’s 40 oceanographers to try it out. “Research ships cost typically $15,000 to $40,000 per day and of course can do much more than a Wave Glider,” says Meinig. “However, the Wave Glider gives us a unique tool to bring down the costs of observations and sample regions of the ocean that are rarely or never visited by research vessels.”

Unlike other unmanned devices and gliders, which rely on batteries that eventually lose their charge, the Wave Glider needs no fuel and captures energy from the environment, converting wave motion into thrust and harvesting sunlight via solar panels to provide electricity for sensors. It can be remotely controlled as well as programmed to travel to a destination. GPS-enabled electronics transmit data gathered by the sensors to the operator’s website.