The rise of the robots: how autonomous vehicles are transforming polar science A robot is cruising beneath Antarctic sea-ice. Another is bolted to the face of a collapsing Greenland glacier. A third is silently counting penguins on a remote, windswept beach. None of them has a human operator nearby. “It’s really cool to be able to whip out my phone here in Cambridge and send commands to a glider that’s doing stuff thousands of miles away in the Antarctic.” Dr Alex Brearley is an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). He’s one of the growing number of scientists who’re using autonomous vehicles to investigate Earth’s rapidly changing polar environments. Underwater, on the surface and in the air – robots of all shapes and sizes are now gathering information on a scale and with a precision that previous generations of researchers could only dream about. Alex could be there in person in the Antarctic – but doesn’t have to be. Commands are uploaded via the internet and when the robots make the connection, they go about their business. Alex has several gliders on the go at any one time. They’re equipped with a range of sensors to tell him about the ocean’s properties and how it’s behaving. His sleek machines resemble torpedoes and move through the ocean with remarkable efficiency. An oil-filled bladder alters their buoyancy, making them sink and rise, while a moveable battery pack changes the centre of mass to pitch the nose either up or down. A set of small wings then converts that vertical motion into a slow forward glide through the water column. No engine. No propeller. Just physics. Periodic visits to the surface enable positioning fixes via GPS and an opportunity to beam back data to Cambridge, as well as picking up new commands.