This Cousteau comes with batteries

A team from McGill, York and Dalhousie universities is hard at work refining AQUA, the world's first amphibious robot. AQUA is a mechanized marine biologist capable of walking on land and swimming underwater -- and it doesn't run out of air, disturb organisms during surveys or suffer decompression sickness at depths below 30 metres. "Like many robots before, AQUA is bio-inspired," says McGill's Chris Prahacs, one of the robot's original designers. "Visually and in the way it moves, AQUA could best be described as a turtle -- though it has six flippers instead of four."