Aquanaut, the Underwater Transformer

The engineers at Houston Mechatronics developed an autonomous submarine that transforms into a humanoid robot. Or rather, the upper half of a humanoid robot, so I guess you could call it a robotic mermaid. The results are so cool that they spent most of the introductory video trying to convince us -and probably themselves- that there are practical reasons for doing this. It is Really Useful, and not just a cool thing they did because they all grew up watching Transformers. Read more specifics about Aquanaut at IEEE Spectrum.

[via Boing Boing]