One of the questions I’ve spent time wondering is what role robotics has to play in tackling climate change. Thankfully, I’m not the only one thinking about this.

More specifically, I’ve come across a number of other people in the marine robotics community who wonder where they could be focusing their efforts to make the most impact. This isn’t surprising; marine robotics has a long history of boosting the efforts of various Earth sciences by providing new ways to observe the ocean.

For an amazing example, of an incredibly simple ‘robot’ making a huge impact we can look to the Argo float program. Right now there are over 3,000 Argo floats drifting around the world’s oceans. All they do is periodically sink and rise in the the water column, taking a few measurements along the way and transmitting all of their data when they surface. They have relatively little autonomy and just go where the currents take them. Still, they’ve revolutionized our scientific capabilities. For example, the Argo float program has provided order-of-magnitude improvements in our ability to monitor the ocean’s heat content, giving us a much better understanding of how and where the ocean is warming. citation needed

In fact, while the ability to observe the ocean has never been greater, our observational capabilities are still arguably the greatest limiting factor in our scientific understanding of the Earth’s systems. We need to continue to develop our observational tools.

One of the greatest insights from the Argo program (and other similar advances) is that the program was not led by engineers or roboticists, but by oceanographers. This underlies it’s success; the program was science-driven and the floats were designed to best meet the needs of the scientific community. I believe this is how the next