Artificial “dolphins” developed by Scottish scientists are to be trialled in UK waters to protect the country’s communications and power supply from sabotage and stormy seas.
Special sensors — based on dolphins’ natural sonar — have been fitted to mobile aquatic robots and used successfully to detect faults in underwater cables in an inland Scottish loch.
The robotic devices do not look like dolphins but have been programmed to move through the seas independently while using the sensors which mimic dolphins’ sonar to scan the seabed and spot damage.
Now researchers at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University are to begin trialling the devices at vulnerable locations around Britain’s coast where thousands of miles of multi-million pound subsea cables are under growing threat from storms and deliberate damage