Skip to main content

MIT invents a way to allow submerged submarines to speak to airplanes

Getting submarines talking to airplanes, finally

In a world in which we don’t think twice about having Wi-Fi on a plane several miles in the air, it’s easy to forget that there are still parts of the planet it’s difficult to communicate with. One of those is thousands of feet underwater on submerged submarines, which have long had issues communicating with the surface.

Recommended Videos

However, that could be about to change thanks to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT engineers created a new underwater-to-air communication system called TARF (Translational Acoustic-RF communication) that is able to seamlessly convert sonar into radar.

“For a long time, the water surface has remained an obstacle for wireless communication,” Fadel Adib, principal investigator for MIT’s Media Lab, told Digital Trends. “Underwater communication relies on sound; in-air communications uses radio signals, like cellular or Wi-Fi — neither of which can cross the water surface. This is why it’s so difficult to find airplanes that disappear underwater, and why submarines can’t directly communicate with satellites.”

The TARF technology turns the water surface from an obstacle into a communication interface by combining sound and radio in an innovative way. It uses an underwater speaker to send data as sound. Sound travels as pressure waves, which vibrate the surface when they hit it from underwater. These vibrations can then be picked up by a sensitive radar above the surface, before being decoded to recover the sound data.

“The research paves [the] way for many applications,” Adib continued. “It would allow submarines to communicate with airplanes without surfacing. It can be used for ocean scientific exploration, where underwater sensors are deployed to monitor marine life and send their data to the surface. In the future, it can also be used to find airplanes that go missing underwater.”

At present, the technology is still in its relative infancy. The team has tested it at depths of 11.5 feet in swimming pools to demonstrate that it can communicate successfully. They have also tested it with circulation currents to mimic some of the environmental conditions it might face in the ocean. Next, the researchers plan to test TARF at greater depths and higher altitudes, along with making the technology more robust to large ocean waves.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
MIT Technology Review predicts the 10 breakthrough technologies of 2020
MIT researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to identify a drug called halicin that kills many strains of bacteria. Halicin (top row) prevented the development of antibiotic resistance in E. coli, while ciprofloxacin (bottom row) did not.

New technologies emerge faster than ever now, but the editors and writers at the MIT Technology Review think they know which ones will be making the biggest impacts this year. The renowned tech magazine published its annual list of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2020 Wednesday morning; editor David Rotman spoke with Digital Trends about why everyone will be talking about tiny A.I., satellite mega-constellations, and anti-aging drugs this year.

“What we do to put the list together is really just ask each of our writers and editors, ‘What are really the most important advances that you've been writing about, thinking about over the last year?’” Rotman told Digital Trends. While it doesn’t have to be the most-covered tech, the breakthroughs that make the list often have multiple companies or organizations working towards making it happen. “We're looking for big trends that are getting a lot of people excited,” he said.

Read more
New ‘shady’ research from MIT uses shadows to see what cameras can’t
mit csail blind inverse light

Computational Mirrors: Revealing Hidden Video

Artificial intelligence could soon help video cameras see lies just beyond what the lens can see -- by using shadows. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have concocted an algorithm that “sees” what’s out of the video frame by analyzing the shadows and shading that out-of-view objects create. The research, Blind Inverse Light Transport by Deep Matrix Factorization, was published today, Dec. 6.

Read more
Honda doubles down on ‘holy grail’ of EV batteries
honda solid state battery production first electric suv 3

While some automakers are scaling back their production of electric vehicles, Honda is basking in the glow of a successful launch of its Prologue EV in the U.S., and was recently dubbed “North America’s most committed automaker.”

And now, Japan’s third-largest automaker is showing a similar commitment to making EVs more efficient and affordable, zeroing in on the production of its own in-house solid-state batteries, also known as the ‘holy grail’ of EV batteries.

Read more