The research vessel Aegaeo lumbered along the Greek coast to a point 85 nautical miles southwest of Athens: the island of Kythira. Here a team from MIT’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Lab launched the yellow, torpedo-shaped Xanthos robot on yet another mission to demonstrate its capability as an undersea archaeological survey tool. Getting to Greece had been no simple task. MIT shipped over 2,700 pounds of robotics, batteries, and support equipment via air cargo from Boston to the port of Piraeus, loaded it aboard a ship, and kept a crew, researchers, engineers, and archaeologists ready to go on a tight timetable.
Running the untethered Xanthos along an ancient trade route 8 to 12 feet above the bottom of the sea (280 feet deep at this point), they discovered and photographed the anchor and other probable remains of a 17th century shipwreck. Sidescan sonar images collected by Xanthos, coupled with gigabytes of digital still images, assured the team and their hosts from the Hellenic Center for Marine Research that they’d discovered something human divers could not have reached. That means scientists will have a better set of tools for discovering and surveying the thousands of shipwrecks lying undisturbed and full of information—not just in Greek waters, but all over the world. Continued…
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