Ocean Glider Robots Watching the Sea and Where ABB Fits

Thousands of instruments drift and glide through the oceans right now with nobody aboard. Almost 4,000 Argo floats sink and rise on a ten-day cycle, and fleets of gliders zigzag below the surface, sending temperature and salinity readings home by satellite. An ocean glider robot has no propeller: it moves by changing its buoyancy, which lets it stay out for weeks or months. This post looks at how the ocean was measured from ships, how floats and gliders took over much of that work, this autumn's hurricane and navy missions, and where ABB robots could fit.

An underwater glider moments after it was deployed from the R/V Pacific Storm. Photo: Craig Hayslip, OSU, Ocean Observatories Initiative via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How oceanographers sampled the sea from ships

Until recently most ocean measurements came from crewed ships. The Challenger expedition of 1872 to 1876 lowered sounding lines and dredges from its deck to reach the sea floor. In 1894 Fridtjof Nansen designed a sampling bottle that was clamped with others along a weighted cable at chosen depths. A messenger weight sent down the cable tripped each bottle in turn to trap a water sample, while reversing thermometers locked in the temperature reading. Shale Niskin's bottle, patented in March 1966, improved on the design, and modern versions can be mounted in a circular frame called a rosette.

Two men attach a Nansen bottle to a sampling wire aboard USNS Kane, 1968. Photo: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The idea of a robot that could do this alone was published in 1989. Henry Stommel described a glider in the journal Oceanography, developed with the engineer Doug Webb, and named it Slocum after Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail alone around the globe. A glider shifts oil in or out of a bladder to change its buoyancy, and its wings turn the sinking and rising into forward motion. Webb Research went on to build battery-powered Slocums. Other designs followed: the Spray can dive to 1,500 metres and the Seaglider to 1,000 metres. In 2009 a Rutgers glider crossed the Atlantic.

An oceanographic glider on deck aboard the research vessel Thomas G. Thompson at the University of Washington, Seattle, 2008. Photo: Joe Mabel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Floats came alongside them. Argo was first proposed at OceanObs 1999 and named after the ship of Greek myth. Its floats drift at about 1,000 metres, and every ten days they sink to 2,000 metres and rise to the surface, measuring conductivity, temperature and pressure on the way up, then send the data by satellite, free to anyone. The planned array of 3,000 floats was complete in November 2007. Today the fleet has almost 4,000, run by a partnership of more than 30 nations, and the most common model is the APEX float from Teledyne Webb Research.

Crew release an Argo float from a research vessel. Photo: NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Hurricane and navy glider missions today

Gliders spent this year's hurricane season off Hawaiʻi. In July 2026 PacIOOS launched two Seagliders south-southeast of Hawaiʻi Island to track conditions down to 900 metres. They joined two Naval Oceanographic Office Slocum gliders off Hawaiʻi and two Navy gliders off Guam, all sending temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen profiles to the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service in Honolulu. When Hurricane Nolo passed, data from glider SG148 showed extra ocean heat reaching down to 60 metres, which improved the model forecasts of ocean heat. NOAA used hurricane gliders for the same job around the Gulf Stream in 2020.

The underwater glider NG301 being recovered alongside NOAA's ship Okeanos Explorer west of St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, 2015. Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Royal Navy is going the same way. On 15 September 2026 it said five Slocum G3 gliders had finished a 64-day mission off the UK, the largest and longest drone deployment in its history, recording conductivity, temperature and depth on their own. The Navy works with Teledyne Marine, which supplies Slocum gliders and APEX floats, and says autonomous systems produced more than 193,000 observations in 2024 and 2025, over half as many as traditional methods collected in the previous 77 years. In France, Ifremer said its two Deep-6000 prototype floats completed five dives to 6,000 metres between 11 January and 2 February.

A Slocum underwater glider on its cart aboard the research vessel Aranda, 2022. Photo: Antti Leppänen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

ABB makes no gliders or floats, and none of the sources for this post ties its robots to one, so the fit is a possibility. These instruments are built in small numbers: Argo has almost 4,000 floats in total, and Ifremer hopes to add about 30 deep ones by 2028. ABB introduced its dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 in 2015 for small parts assembly, with people and robot working side by side on small lots of individual products, which matches that kind of production. Its grippers can carry built-in cameras for checking parts. Cells like this are usually planned in RobotStudio before anything is bolted down.

ABB's dual-arm YuMi IRB 14000 working beside a lab technician. Photo: ABB

Where ocean glider robots go next

Floats are also going deeper and measuring more. Ifremer's Deep-6000 project could add around 30 deep floats to Argo by 2028, which would let researchers measure more than 98 percent of the ocean's volume, and France is the third country after China and the United States to build floats for 6,000 metres. Argo is also developing BioArgo, which adds biological and chemical sensors. The Royal Navy says more sensors will enter service soon, as part of a programme to move ocean data collection from crewed ships to a network of autonomous systems.

A Deep Arvor Argo float is deployed during the 2017 RREX cruise of the research vessel Atalante. Photo: Kevin Balem, Ifremer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Households get the benefit through forecasts. The gliders off Hawaiʻi fed the National Hurricane Center and the Honolulu forecast office during storms, and Argo data is free to anyone who wants to download the same profiles researchers use. For factories, more floats and gliders mean more pressure housings, batteries and sensors to assemble and test. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot, which ABB says can share a workspace with people without fences and comes with protection up to IP67, could take over repetitive test steps. That is a possibility; no such project has been reported.

An ABB GoFa cobot at a gas leak and electrical test station on Electrolux's refrigerator line in Curitiba, Brazil. Photo: ABB

Depth is still hard. At 6,000 metres the pressure is roughly 600 times that at sea level, so Ifremer built its deep floats from composite materials, and each weighs about 40 kilograms, twice a typical Argo float. Gliders also trade speed for endurance and cover ground slowly. Running them takes new skills, and the Royal Navy team needed more than a year to turn gliders into an operational capability. On the factory side, ABB's Wizard Easy Programming aims to let first-time users teach a robot in about 10 minutes; our guide to no-code robot control covers the same idea.

Programming a single-arm YuMi with Wizard on the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

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