How Are Marine Robots Shaping Our Future?

by James Bellingham, Claudia Geib (With)

Overview

What will robots discover as they gather life-supporting data and resources from the depths of Earth's oceans to the reaches of deep space?

Below the waves, the ocean remains a largely undiscovered realm, with only 25% of its features mapped in detail. What we know about its depths, we've learned with the help of deep-sea robots. The latest generation of their technologies play a critical role as we tap the ocean in new ways to sustain our food, energy, and resource needs. World-renowned robotics expert James Bellingham introduces readers to this compelling world of contemporary undersea exploration and the vital role autonomous robots play in corporate and governmental aquaculture management, climate data, energy source locations, shipwreck explorations, and much more.

Bellingham, an inventor who has led dozens of expeditions from the Arctic to the Antarctic, discusses how deep-sea research using autonomous underwater vehicles and drones can translate into future missions, including the exploration of oceans on other planets and their moons. These forbidding environments are difficult to access and are not easily conducive to life, making robots that can move, explore, and collect data—without the need for crews—critically important for research and the development of essential industries that support our survival.

Exploration robotics works on three frontiers simultaneously: scientific discovery, advanced technology, and extreme environments. Bellingham shares harrowing anecdotes from his work on all three, including weathering storms off the Antarctic Peninsula, breaking new ground in designing and deploying ocean robots that think and navigate for themselves, and seeing the ocean in a new light through the eyes of these technological proxies. Along the way, readers will develop a newfound appreciation for how robots are transforming exploration—and what these voyages mean for the future of humanity.

The more marine robotics extend our physical and intellectual capacities, the more they challenge us to redefine what it means to coexist with the world around us. The real revolution is just beginning, lying in how these machines will transform our understanding of our environments—allowing us to balance discovery with stewardship by supporting a thriving human society while safeguarding the ecosystems we depend on.

In classrooms, field stations, and laboratories in Baltimore and around the world, Johns Hopkins University professors are opening the boundaries of our understanding of many of the world's most complex challenges. The Johns Hopkins Wavelengths book series brings readers inside their stories, illustrating how their pioneering discoveries benefit people in their neighborhoods and across the globe in artificial intelligence, cancer research, food systems' environmental impacts, health equity, planetary science, science diplomacy, and other critical arenas of study. Through these compelling narratives, their insights will spark conversations from dorm rooms to dining rooms to boardrooms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421450353
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Series:	Johns Hopkins Wavelengths
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

James Bellingham, PhD, is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of exploration robotics. For more than 30 years, Bellingham has served as a global leader in the development of small, high-performance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), introducing and refining a class of systems that are now widely used within the military, commercial industries, and science communities. He has been instrumental in innovations for ocean observation and has spent considerable time at sea, leading two dozen AUV expeditions in locations across the Antarctic, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, South Pacific, and Arctic. Bellingham previously led robotics teams at MIT, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Claudia Geib is a science journalist, editor, and the producer of the podcast Gastropod. She is also the author of Secrets of the Elephants. Her reporting, focusing on marine, environmental, and wildlife science, can be found in Nautilus, The Guardian, and WIRED, among others, and has been featured in The Best American Science Writing.

James Bellingham, PhD, is the executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Assured Autonomy and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of exploration robotics. For more than 30 years, Bellingham has been a global leader in the development of small, high-performance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), resulting in a class of systems that are now widely used within the military, industry, and science communities. He has been instrumental in innovations for ocean observing and has spent considerable time at sea, leading two dozen AUV expeditions in locations across the Antarctic, North Atlantic, Mediterranean, South Pacific, and Arctic.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
1. The Challenge of Searching the Seas
2. Opening the Door
3. Teamwork
4. The Living Ocean
5. The Ocean in Our Kitchens
6. Powered by the Ocean
7. Oceans Across the Solar System
8. Could Deep Sea Robots Discover Life in Deep Space?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Bellingham's book, which illuminates the desires, challenges, innovations, and rewards of exploration in extreme ocean conditions, stirs the same emotions and curiosity that led me toward venturing into space.
—Daniel Tani, NASA astronaut, space shuttles Endeavor and Discovery; NASA aquanaut, NEEMO 2; Director, Northrop Grumman Space Systems

Bellingham and Geib present real-world events to frame the impacts of complex and elegant marine exploration systems here on Earth, and how they might one day search for life in the seas of our neighboring planets and moons.
—Rear Admiral Lorin Selby, United States Navy (Ret); former Chief of Naval Research

[D]escribes in considerable detail the physical conditions of the ocean's terrain and the complex array of equipment used—yesterday and today—to explore it. An interesting and readable account of the history and potential of marine exploration technology—at last!
—Daniel L. Pawson, Senior Scientist Emeritus and former Director, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

As a global leader in the design and utilization of autonomous underwater systems, Bellingham offers an insightful and compelling set of case studies which define not only the trajectory of the science, but a sense of how valuable robotics technologies will be in addressing society's most critical problems.
—Richard Spinrad, former Chief Scientist and Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, NOAA

[P]ulls back the curtain on the hidden oceanic expanse and demonstrates why it's so vital to our future.
—George Nolfi, screenwriter, The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean's Twelve; writer-director, The Adjustment Bureau and The Banker