The million dollar question: who lives on the ocean floor?

The X-Prize Foundation , awarding inventors for breakthrough innovations that are useful to all people, announced a new competition . This time, instead of space and planets, everyone is invited to try to explore another secret hidden from us - the ocean floor.

Competition participants are invited to try to build robots that can work at sea depths up to 4000 m. Robots will need to build maps of the bottom, and meet several criteria for autonomy, depth, and speed of movement. The winner will get a prize of $ 4 million, for the second place they promise $ 1 million.
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The teams in the top ten will share another million, and an additional million will be awarded in the case of developing innovative biological and chemical sensors capable of operating at depth.

The main objectives of the robots are to build bathymetric (deep) maps of the bottom, to take pictures of a specific object at depth, to establish in detail the archaeological, biological and geological parameters of the designated area and to track biological and chemical signals to their source.

Potential participants in the competition still have time: 9 months to file applications for participation, and 18 months to prepare for competitions. The competitions will be held in two stages - at the first stage there will be dives at a depth of 2 km, at the second - at depths of up to 4 km. Registration in the competition is available to everyone.

According to the founders of the contest , the World Ocean, covering 2/3 of the Earth’s surface, was studied only by 5%. Extreme pressures, temperature conditions, and other problems make the ocean floor almost as difficult to reach for humans as outer space.

The X-Prize Foundation (X-Prize Foundation) is a premium fund to support revolutionary innovations aimed at improving the lives of all mankind. Prizes are awarded in four categories: energy and environment, environmental development, education and development, biology and medicine. The fund comes from private donors and corporations.