A team from Stanford University in California, led by the head of Stanford’s robotics lab, Oussama Khatib, has developed a humanoid robotic diver with artificial intelligence designed to recover artefacts from the sea floor. The robot, OceanOne, which has stereoscopic vision and an artificial brain, is controlled by specialists on board a boat, who use a joystick to guide its movements. “The intent is to have a human diving virtually, to put the human out of harm’s way,” Khatib says. OceanOne recently explored the wreck of Louis XIV’s flagship La Lune, which sank in the Mediterranean in 1664.
