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Since SPURV, there have been many other unmanned underwater vehicles, of various shapes and sizes and for various missions, developed in the United States and elsewhere. “No one wants to write a report to their funders saying, ‘Sorry, the batteries died, and we lost our million-dollar robot fish in a current,’ ” Marburg says. The goal, then, is to build UUVs that are simple, effective, and reliable.
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Support for purely speculative research in this area is rare. Working on underwater robots, Marburg says, means balancing technical risks and mission objectives against constraints on funding and other resources. The project was so successful that additional SPURVs were developed, eventually completing nearly 400 missions by the time it ended in 1979. In one study, for example, SPURV carried a fluorometer to measure the dispersion of dye in the water, to support wake studies. Over time, SPURV’s instrumentation grew more capable, and the scope of the project expanded. Data was recorded to magnetic tape and later transferred to a photosensitive paper strip recorder or other computer-compatible media and then plotted using an IBM 1130. Just over 3 meters long, it could dive to 3,600 meters, had a top speed of 2.5 m/s, and operated for 5.5 hours on a battery pack. Unlike Charlie, with its fishy exterior, SPURV had a utilitarian torpedo shape that was more in line with its mission. SPURV’s original purpose was to gather data on the physical properties of the sea, in particular temperature and sound velocity. One of the earliest UUVs happens to sit in the hall outside Marburg’s office: the Self-Propelled Underwater Research Vehicle, or SPURV, developed at the applied physics lab beginning in the late ’50s. In nearly 400 deployments, no SPURVs were lost.
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To explore those uncharted regions, he said, “we are forced to solve the technical problems and make the robots work.”Īn oil painting commemorates SPURV, a series of underwater research robots built by the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab. “The nature of the oceans is that we can only go there with robots,” he told me in a recent Zoom call. Other projects looked at sea drones for surveillance and scientific data collection.Īaron Marburg, a principal electrical and computer engineer who works on UUVs at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory, notes that the world’s oceans are largely off-limits to crewed vessels. Navy’s funding of technology for deep-sea rescue and salvage operations. In the United States, such research began in earnest in the 1950s, with the U.S. The CIA was far from alone in its pursuit of UUVs nor was it the first agency to do so. (Some species of catfish can grow to 2 meters.) Whether Charlie reeled in any useful intel is unknown, as details of its missions are still classified.įor exploring watery environments, nothing beats a robot At 61 centimeters long, Charlie wouldn’t set any biggest-fish records. Not much has been revealed about the fish’s construction except that its body contained a pressure hull, ballast system, and communications system, while its tail housed the propulsion. Its handler controlled the fish via a line-of-sight radio handset. More precisely, Charlie was an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) designed to surreptitiously collect water samples. Except that the CIA’s Charlie was a catfish.
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When the CIA’s Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs started conducting some fish-focused research in the 1990s, Charlie must have seemed like the perfect code name. The popular ad campaign ran for several decades, and its catchphrase “Sorry, Charlie” quickly hooked itself in the American lexicon. In 1961, Tom Rogers of the Leo Burnett Agency created Charlie the Tuna, a jive-talking cartoon mascot and spokesfish for the StarKist brand.