For decades navies have employed human divers, dolphins and sea lions to search for explosives attached to the hulls of warships by a scuba-diving enemy. Although these mine-finding tactics work, they are less than ideal. Divers can be killed or injured and marine mammals are extremely costly to maintain on a boat. Mines are also getting smaller and harder to detect. The idea of using aquatic robots to search for the mines instead is alluring, but it is difficult to teach machines how to navigate around hulls without crashing into them or getting lost. Franz Hover and Brendan Englot at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (mit) have come up with a way to improve things by using a two-step process.
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