Adorable or terrifying: Researchers unveil tentacular marine exploration drone prototype guaranteed to set off your Subnautica flashbacks

I’ve never been the strongest swimmer; despite weekly trips to the pool with school, I never did manage to graduate from the shallow end paddlers. While some of my peers took to the water like a duck, or swam like a fish, I thrashed around like an octopus whose stubborn limbs refused to co-ordinate.

Truly, I put cephalopods to shame everywhere—if they can figure it out, with their semi-autonomous limbs, then why couldn’t I with my big human brain? Well, some bigger brained humans than I have taken my younger self’s question one step further by creating a ‘soft’ robot that can swim with its own noodly appendages.

The ZodiAq is an underwater drone that does much more than simply tread water (via Hackaday). 12 soft-body, flagella-like limbs allow the ZodiAq drone to swim and crawl across the sea floor with an impressive amount of maneuverability. This tentacular method of locomotion also ensures minimal disruption to any deep sea inhabitants in the water-logged neighbourhood. When in Rome, and all that jazz.

A ballast inside the drone shifts its centre of gravity to keep it submerged, while each of the 12 swim limbs are attached to an individual motor, the speed and direction of which are all controlled by an onboard Raspberry Pi. You can see it in motion in this LinkedIn post from research team member Anup Teejo Mathew.

Besides onboard sensors tracking temperature and humidity as a form of internal damage detection, an onboard camera, and an Inertial Measurement Unit acting as a motion sensor, ensure the drone doesn’t bump into anything as it bobs along. The full research paper breaks down just what makes the ZodiAq tick (namely Lithium Polymer batteries) and is well worth the deep dive.

I’ve no doubt that for some this marine exploration drone is definitely giving some ‘oh no, I’ve ventured too deep in Subnautica and I really need to get out of here’ vibes, but I for one am totally enamoured with this little robo. For one thing, the wee beastie is unlikely to chase you down as it can only cover “a distance of two body lengths every 15 seconds,” even at top speed. You could say you’re more likely to catch this bacteria-inspired bot, than this drone is to catch up to you.

Sniff-worthy puns aside, the prototype deep sea drone isn’t designed to use all 12 limbs to swim at once. In part, this is due to baked-in redundancy; basically, if a motor fails in one or even more limbs, the drone still has enough to slowly make its way home. For another thing, multiple limbs working together rather than all waggling at the same time allows the drone a greater range of somewhat sophisticated movement.

As robotics go, The ZodiAq is certainly one of the more practical uses I’ve seen recently. Between this sinewy nightmare fuel and this generous would-be domestic robot giving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang a flash leather jacket, let’s just say I’ve not been all that impressed by big tech’s efforts as of late.

Still, the ZodiAq team aren’t the only ones taking inspiration from what already exists in the natural world, with MIT researchers creating fleshy meat robots too. Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a closer look at the ZodiAq’s research paper and try to figure out on just which face of the dodecagonal drone they mounted that camera.