Off the coast of Malta, Chris Clark was sitting on a small boat waiting for his underwater robot to talk to him. It was autonomously exploring the sea bed hunting for signs of a wreckage, but was unable to relay what it had found until it surfaced.

“We could have gone back to shore, but we prefer to sit out there babysitting it, chit chatting and hypothesising about what it might find,” says Clark at Harvey Mudd College in California.

On this …