
This is an amazing step forward for those in the smuggling trade.
The first of four autonomous ocean-spanning robots with software brewed by Java creator James Gosling has arrived in Australia intact after more than 365 days at sea. Last March, the robots entered the Guinness Book of Records for the longest autonomous seafaring journey, when they passed the 5,150 km-mark on their journey. In …
Basically, you have a floaty bit, and a sunken bit attached by some something solid or at least inelastic. The floaty bit bobs on waves bigger than it is long. So it rides up and down. The sunken bit isn't affected much by the wave, but since it's attached, it gets dragged up and down through the water. If you attach some flappy planes or wings to the sunken bit, arranged so that they can swivel some through horizontal on an offset pivot, that up-and-down gets vectored into a small amount of thrust in the direction that the pivot is offset, which shoves the sunken bit forward, dragging the floaty bit along with it. It's not much thrust, each wave, but it's essentially free, and if you coat the floaty bit with enough solar cells (and/or attach generation equipment to your flappy planes), you make a robot boat out of it that will go where the robot brain says to, eventually,