US: Established in 1995, the Xprize Foundation, has announced the prize money for the Ocean Discovery Xprize competition. The prize money for the competition will be 7 million dollars. The global competition is aimed at developing new autonomous technologies for exploring and mapping the ocean floor.
Organizers hope that the competition will accelerate all aspects of deep sea exploration, leading to new scientific discoveries in dozens of areas including oceanography, geology, marine biology, material science, and medicine.
Announced in 2015, the competition has attracted dozens of registrants from around the world, including teams backed by private technology companies, government agencies, and universities. The contest includes two scheduled test trials in which teams must generate underwater maps and images of a designated offshore area within a limited amount of time.
The top finishers will split the $1 million milestone prize and move on to a second round of testing, slated for September 2018 at 4,000 meter depths. At the end of the competition, a $4 million grand prize and $1 million second place prize will be awarded.
Like any competition, the Ocean Discovery Xprize has some hard-and-fast rules. First and foremost, the exploration technologies must be unmanned and launched from shore. That means robots, and lots of them.
The competing teams approach the challenge differently, using various technologies including aerial drones, underwater autonomous vehicles, robot swarms, and artificial intelligence. The decision to limit the competition to automated technology is quite deliberate, said Jyotika Virmani, a senior director with Xprize’s energy and environment group.
“What we’ve done with this competition is remove the need for ships,” Virmani said. “Ships and crews are always the most expensive component. It can cost $60-120,000 per day to go out on the ocean. And if you’re sailing for ten days before you even start mapping, you’ve lost a lot of money.”
Current estimates suggest it would take around $3 billion to map the entire sea floor using existing techniques and technologies, Virmani said. The expense has long hindered the development of coordinated global ocean exploration.
Each of the teams employ some combination of autonomous aerial, surface, and underwater vehicles. For instance, an aerial drone might fly from shore then drop a surface vehicle, which in turn deploys UAVs to dive to the ocean floor.
Since oceans cover roughly 70 percent of the planet, that means we’ve only really surveyed a small portion of the Earth‘s overall surface.
