Hacker News Reader

Sounds great, if you stop reading before the second-to-last sentence:

"Because radio transmission through water is difficult, the craft must be tethered at this time to provide continuous communications."

View on HN

Artificial intelligence will help with that. For high value activities like detecting underwater mines and collecting data for underwater oil spills, etc., there should be enough funding to make these autonomous.

That's not the fundamental problem if you want a real-time communication link for something like, say, an inspection or a search and rescue operation - transmitting radio through water is. Water is a pretty bad medium for transmitting RF energy.

You could use ultrasound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com