The motivation is the lack of high-resolution maps of the ocean bed. More than 90% of the sea floor has not been surveyed in detail.
“The small fraction of the ocean we have explored has already provided us with potential treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS. Imagine what other cures are down there,” said X Prize technical director, Dr Jyotika Virmani. “What else might we discover if we could explore more of this vast resource?”
Although technologies already exist to survey the seabed at 4,000m down they can be prohibitively expensive to deploy, the ships used to transport the test equipment can cost over $60,000 per day to operate and vehicles that can travel that deep can cost over $1m.
The rules for the X Prize state that entrants will have to deploy their solutions from land or from the air; they cannot use a ship or even be in the survey area at the time. Therefore the systems will need to be fully autonomous.
There will be two rounds to the competition. The first, to be held in 2017, will be undertaken at a depth of 2000m, and will require teams to make a bathymetric map of at least 20% of a 500km2 zone of seabed in around six to eight hours.
The top 10 teams will then go forward to the second round, which will be held at the full competition depth of 4000m. At least 50% of this area will have to be mapped in 12 to 15 hours. The teams will also have to produce high-resolution images of a target specified by the organisers.
Control and communications in the dark at 4000m will be tough enough, never mind the consideration of pressure, which will be about 40megapascals - nearly 6000psi.
X Prize CEO Dr Peter Diamandis added: "What we're going to see will be more autonomous; it's going to be smaller; it's going to be cheaper; it's probably going to be swarm in nature. This is what we're seeing because of the proliferation of cellphone technology. Robots are getting much more capable."
$1million of the $7m prize fund will be reserved for the team that can demonstrate new chemical and biological underwater sensors. To win this, the group will need to ‘sniff’ a target to its source in the survey zone, this will simulate the ability to detect sources of of pollution and enable rapid responses to them. That prize is sponsored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
