Defense Contractors Snap Up Submersible Robot Gliders [Update]

The new arrival to the underwater world are small submersible robots known as gliders because they thrust themselves through the water not with propellers but by simply changing their buoyancy. Gliders consume just a trickle of power and can remain at sea for several months at a time, surfacing only to get a GPS fix and beam data to satellites. A mission using a conventional autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) lasts only hours. Now it seems gliders have caught the attention of some other big fish.