Imagine our oceans for a moment. Now imagine what we could do to improve their overall health? What are we missing?
When you think about AI, you likely don’t think about fish. The fact is, however, the founders of Aquaai did just that. Their efforts spring from the fact that one of their founders promised his daughter that he would create a robot one day that could actually “save our seas.” Over time, this quickly became the mission that drove the founders in their work.
If you’re wondering how this has worked out in practice so far, it’s actually quite simple. Aquaai is now offering a robotic fish, together with an integrated dashboard for interested companies to see the data the fish collects from the ocean’s depths and organize it to suit their needs.
Included in this is the fact that users of the platform can access VR, Computer Vision, and other futuristic technologies to optimize the metrics that their fish generate. At this point, it is logical to ask what some examples of these metrics might be.
Judging by the info that is publicly available on the Aquaai site, as well as that which was said by one of the founders in an interview with the Boost VC podcast, this mainly amounts to the data that an expert marine biologist might generate. For those of you who may not be familiar with the field, imagine that the Aquaai drone acts like a chemist that never really stops working. In theory, at least, you always know the relative health of a certain area of water.
Again, with this, we are still left with the question of what would be measured in this case.
In practice, an easy way to answer this question could be to picture the usage of the drones on a fish farm to make sure the fish live in a healthy habitat and are therefore, safe for humans to eat. With this, we can then say that the drone would be looking at areas like the level of pollution in the water, as well as specifically what pollutants might be there. We could then also add that it would keep tabs on the water temperature.
While other measurements would surely be applicable here, this is a good starting point, though we still haven’t explicitly laid out why the Aquaai drone may be though of as an AI system. In a basic sense, the answer is pretty cut-and-dry. The drone operates on its’ own and learns how to do its’ job better on its’ own. Human intervention appears to be optional and customizable according to the company’s needs.
For now, Aquaai’s drones run on supervised learning frameworks, though in the future, perhaps our oceans will be full of autonomous, robotic chemists. At this point, the next step for them, according to the Boost VC interview that is listed below, is to identify new metrics that might be important to increasing the health of our oceans. What these end up being is up to the drone fleet and its’ human observers to decide, though rest assured that the mission of Aquaai seems to remain paramount in everything they are doing. Perhaps one day, this will include actively cleaning our waters, though for now, this is not the case.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. A larger group of companies exists that is doing similar work and we will keep you informed on them as well as time goes on. For now, check out some of the Aquaai-related resources below to stay up to date on their efforts.
