NASA is developing robots that can navigate the sea for years.

Bill Vass, CEO of Liquid Robotics, will present “Where The Cloud Meets the Ocean,” at 2 p.m. on April 3rd and discuss how “seven megatrends are converging to change the way ocean research operations and data collection is done across the globe.”

The movement will inevitably save research organizations considerable money. Bill Vass explained in the following YouTube video that:

Ships obviously are wonderful things for moving cargo and people and those kinds of things but a ship has tremendous expense based on bunker fuel, capital depreciation, maintenance, insurance risk, all those kinds of things. None of that is true of a robot — … so having that autonomy and ability to operate for long periods of time is something that makes us much more flexible than a ship.

The robotic technology within these machines is a combination of smartphone technology, micro and nano sensors, wave energy propulsion systems, GPS, wireless communication systems, and cloud computing.