This Low-Cost Robot Can Help You Explore the Ocean | Nat Geo Live

DAVID LANG: A few years ago, I had this big epiphany. How do we shift from just something we're building together to all of these ways that we could be exploring together? We're building the largest ocean observation network in the world and we're doing it with other people. It's powered by citizens. So I'm gonna start my story four years ago. I met this amazing person named Eric Stackpole and he told me this wonderful story about this underwater cave that was filled with gold supposedly. And he told this whole story of treasure hunters who had tried to find it, and then he showed me this little underwater robot that he was trying to build to explore. It's called an ROV, a remotely operated vehicle, and how it works is it goes down underneath the surface. It's got a camera, it sends live video up a thin tether to the operator on the surface who can see what it's seeing and drive it. I was captivated by Eric's story. We didn't have any money to buy one of these ROVs ourselves, and unfortunately, we also didn't know how to build one ourselves. We had an early prototype, but it didn't work. So we did what anybody would do in our position, we asked the internet for help. (laughter) We created a website called OpenROV.com and we started asking people to critique our designs and help us improve it. At first, it was just me and Eric asking questions to each other about buoyancy and basic engineering, and slowly, people began to add feedback and give us advice. I think they just took pity on us, but eventually, we got to the point where the robot was good enough to take to the caves, so we got our friends together, we mounted a little expedition, and we sent the robot into the back of the cave and it went down, down. We found millions of dollars of gold. (laughter) Actually, we didn't. We didn't find anything, but we learned a lot, and that was the important thing. And one of the important things we learned was that this low-cost underwater robot kit was something that other people wanted. And so, we decided to put it on Kickstarter, and we raised $100,000. This was back in 2012 when that was a lot of money on Kickstarter, and it was certainly more than we expected, and it caused us to really quickly outgrow our garage operation. I remember the day when the boxes showed up and I was thinking, oh, my gosh. But we got them together and we got them shipped out, and over the past three years, we've shipped thousands of these things to every corner of the globe. They've gone to the bottom of the Earth in Antarctica. They've gone to the top of the Earth. I got this photo last week from an explorer who was studying glacial lakes in the Himalayas. These are schools in Oakland. These are communities in Papua New Guinea. We have people who are discovering glass sponge reefs in British Columbia. We have people who are creating 3D visualizations of habitat for Caribbean monk seals. I mean, the community just continues to surprise us. This was from last week. We were up at Lake Tahoe. We found a shipwreck at 120 meters and we were streaming it all live to Facebook and Ustream and Twitch TV. It was pretty exciting moment for us last week. Our latest design is the Trident. So, we took all the things that we've learned over the past three years and we put that into a new design for underwater robots that we think is an evolutionary step forward for low-cost underwater drones. This thing is fast, it flies like a fighter jet, but it's also super maneuverable, and still costs less than $1500. So other people wanted this, too, and so we raised $810,000 for this on Kickstarter last October and we're preparing to ship it in the fall of this year, so we're really excited about that. I think this is pretty amazing. In just a few years, two guys in a garage have turned into a global community of ocean explorers. We're building the largest ocean observation network in the world, and we're doing it with other people. It's powered by citizens. This is Laura James. She was one of the first people to notice that sea stars were dying around the Puget Sound and she notified scientists and they confirmed that it was part of this widespread die off that was going on around the Pacific coast called sea star wasting syndrome. They didn't know what was causing it, and Laura was not content with that answer, so she started a citizen science project to get people to notice and contribute data. That data was then part of Pete Raimondi's work at UC Santa Cruz, and they did this amazing PBS story about Laura and her citizen science project and all the people that are contributing, and a Congressman saw that and decided to introduce the Emergency Marine Disease Act, and so there's this bill in Congress right now. You can call and help push it along, but I love this story because this is it. You know, this isn't just a headline that sea stars are dying. This is people who are getting involved. This is congresspeople who are taking notice and action is happening. Laura and her team are still out there. Now they're monitoring stormwater runoff to see if that's the problem. They're looking at urchins to see if the virus is spreading. It's the scientific method, actually becomes the message. There's this whole architecture for participation. That's a big deal. So I don't wanna go into the details of what's going on in Flint. It's an ongoing disaster and all of you know about it. But I do wanna point out that that, too, was a citizen science project. Professor Mark Edwards at Virginia Tech was sick of the institutional failure so he gave out 300 kits to the community and said, "You guys need to start testing your water and take action." And they did. There's a fantastic piece in Wired. My favorite paragraph is towards the end it said, "This kind of citizen-powered, "apocalypse-averting science is spreading." And he went on to list a whole host of citizen science projects that were doing similar work. At the end of that paragraph, I love this line, I'm gonna read it. "Researchers are learning that there's a difference "between publishing results and actually, "you know, getting them." (laughter) (applause) And so that's where we are. That's what's going on. The tools are getting really good, really fast. All of the micro-controllers and sensors and cameras and GPS are now building blocks that makers can use and all of these maker spaces are popping up all over the world, in classrooms, in museums, in libraries, and just in neighborhoods. It's profound, and people have access to powerful digital fabrication tools like laser cutters and 3D printers. It would've been impossible for Eric to do what we did just five years ago. I mean, we're really at the very beginning of this. This is our same garage; this is our roommates at the time, and they had this idea to create low-cost satellites using these same components, and so they prototyped this satellite in the garage, and they have since started a company, raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and launched a constellation of hundreds of satellites that are now getting an image of every location on Earth every day. It's a big company and they're doing important work. This is an illegal gold mining operation in Peru that they found encroaching on this river. It's really extraordinary. I mean, this used to be the stuff of nation-states, and now it's our roommates starting this in the garage. (laughter) It's extraordinary. This is not just a Silicon Valley story either. These are DIY drones being used in Indonesia for conservation. Fifty-cent microscopes, tens of thousands of people are exploring the microcosmos. Creating DIY Geiger counters to monitor the radiation after Fukushima. There's all sorts of low-cost, DIY bio equipment that are being used to power garage labs and community bio labs across the world. The list goes on and on. We need everyone to see themselves as explorers. We need everybody to recognize that they have the agency to be curious, to ask questions because I promise you, when you give people the tools to ask questions, they will surprise you with what they ask and with what they discover. Thank you. (applause)