Underwater Human Detection- Myth or a distant dream?

 {Archived from aravindalokam.com}

Water accidents are everywhere. In recent Kerala floods, we thought of developing an underwater robot which could go inside water, to places difficult for human to reach and help them in anything; from picking up things to human rescue. If we could develop some machine like this, lives would be made simpler. But then I understood the strong knots in the issue. Its not simple to develop a machine which can beat human instincts. The machine should be brainy enough to act like a human.
In our final year undergraduate project work, we had tried to adress the issue. We made a machine which can detect possible human like figures from camera, and control the actuators so as to track and lock the object while moving towards it. Difficulty is detecting the human here. Hopefully future research works will adress the problem.