Seen in Boingboing.net this week:
Robot explores ancient Greek shipwreck
David Pescovitz: Last summer, a team researchers dispatched an autonomous undersea robot to explore a Greek merchant ship that sank in the eastern Aegean Sea in the fourth century BC. The scientists from MIT, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, are just now releasing images from the photometric survey. From the MIT News Office:
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The AUV scanned the scattered cargo and created a topographical sonar map while collecting thousands of high-resolution digital images, without ever physically touching the shipwreck. In all, 7,650 images were collected on four dives. WHOI archaeologists and engineers are assembling those images into mosaics that depict the minute features of the shipwreck with unmatched clarity and detail…