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As the underwater robot OceanOneK carefully navigated toward the upper deck railing of the sunken Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi about 500 m below the Mediterranean’s surface this month, roboticist Oussama Khatib felt as though he himself were there.

OceanOneK looks like a human diver from the front, with eight multi-directional thrusters (推进器) that allow careful operation underwater. The robot’s touch-based feedback system and 3D vision produced incredibly realistic sensations that equaled what he would have experienced were he down below, rather than above onboard the control ship. Observing through OceanOneK robot’s eyes and feeling through its hands, Khatib perceived a new dimension of colorful life — pink and green and orange — layered on and around the ship. He felt the resistance of the water and could recognize the shapes of the historic relic around him.

The mission of OceanOneK to these depths had two purposes: to explore places no one has gone to before and to show that human touch, vision, and interactivity can be brought to the sites far-removed from where people can operate.

While OceanOneK had many noteworthy adventures and successes during two multi-stop trips around the Mediterranean, the accomplishment of the team and the ship’s crew was demonstrating functional autonomy at nearly 1,000 m down. It was this advance that earned OceanOne’s renaming to OceanOneK.

“This is the first time that a robot has been capable of going to such a depth, interacting with the environment, and permitting the human operator to feel that environment,” said Khatib. “It has been an incredible journey.”

“Distancing humans physically from dangerous and unreachable spaces while connecting their skills and experience to the task promises to fundamentally alter remote work,” said Khatib. “Robotic avatars (化身) will search for and acquire materials, build structures, and perform disaster prevention and recovery operations — be it deep in oceans and mines, at mountain tops, or in space.”