Liquid Robotics, which makes submersible robots, is announcing today the winners of its grand prize for the super ocean geek scientist who made the best use of the data collected by the company’s Wave Gliders ocean robots.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has created its Wave Glider series of robots that ride the ocean waves and collect data such as the make-up of water in different parts of the ocean and size of waves. So the company created a contest, the Liquid Robotics PacX Challenge, to encourage scientists use its robots.
Tracy Villareal, a marine scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, won the grand prize which includes the chance to program a robot to do what he wants for six months. His was one of many entries that focused on measuring the effects of global climate change using the Wave Glider data.
Villareal and his collaborator, Kara Wilson of the government’s NOAA Fisheries investigated the population “dead zones” of phytoplankton, the microscopic organisms that are at the bottom of the food chain in the ocean. He searched for large concentrations or absences of phytoplankton in the deep ocean using both four Wave Gliders and data from satellite imagery.
Read also:
Liquid Robotics Announces PacX Challenge Grand Prize Winner (Marketwired (press release))
Liquid Robotics crowns PacX Challenge winner for ocean research (CNET)
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