Pushed into water, the robot looks like nothing so much as a giant carrot, puttering about a vast ocean. Named "EMILY", the machine is a tethered and remotely piloted life preserver, designed and built by Hydronalix. The name awkwardly stands for "EMergency Integrated Lifesaving lanYard", and we praised an early version of the product in 2010 as the Best Of What's New. Now, to help save refugees on capsizing boats in the Aegean and Mediterranean, Greece's Coast Guard is testing the robot rescuers.

The robots made their way to Greece through the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University and the work of Roboticists Without Borders. As Wired reports:

In fact, NGOs on the island [of Lesvos, in Greece] had already been thinking about using UAVs to aid rescue efforts, says Robin Murphy, the Texas A&M roboticist running the project. "In the meantime we were saying, 'You're talking about people drowning,'" Murphy says. "There's this new technology, EMILY, these robots that are life preservers."