Roger Hine's Seagoing Robot

In 2005, Roger Hine was designing equipment to manufacture semiconductors at Asyst Technologies in Fremont, Calif., when he was asked to take on an offbeat freelance project. Jupiter Research Foundation, a nonprofit that develops new technologies to monitor the natural world, contacted the robotics engineer about creating a gizmo to help record whale sounds. Jupiter had already tried hooking up an underwater microphone to a buoy, but that proved unworkable. Chairman Joseph D. Rizzi wanted an independently powered device that could troll the seas for months and return to shore undamaged.

Hine, 39, first approached the project as "just a fun engineering problem." Over the course of a year, he fashioned a contraption with two main parts. A surfboard-shaped floating portion rises and falls with the passing waves. A cable connects it to a torpedo-shaped unit 22 feet below. As the rig moves up and down, wings on the submersible portion convert the motion into forward thrust. "The surface was probably the worst place to be if you wanted something to remain stationary," says Hine. "So we wanted part of the system below, away from the winds and surface currents."