http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNcyAEtXjyI&feature=related

That's not gonna work. The OP wants the students to be able to remove it.

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the purpose of the Constitution...

You seem to think the Constitution exists IN SPITE of the government, but to the contrary it exists BECAUSE governments (of all types) push the boundaries and strive for more power.

I don't think the designers appreciate the difficulties what they are proposing.

First they suggest someone could/should have thousands of these autonomous vehicles sitting around (in an operational state) waiting for oil spills (with no auxiliary purpose).

Second they ignore the sheer chaos that would ensue as thousands of small, low-profile vehicles travel in and around other vessels necessary to actually stop/control an oil spill. These things wont show up on radar. They probably can't be seen at night, and are likely difficult or impossible to avoid by the large ships that get called to such oil spill areas. So either you have to drastically rework ship traffic to avoid the robots, maintain exclusion areas around the robots, or banish the robots to areas away from essential ship traffic.

Third, operating autonomous vehicles at sea is very difficult. Doing so on these scales is not only difficult, it's absolutely unheard of. Nigh impossible. Keeping small numbers of autonomous vehicles operational, launching them, and successfully recovering them is no easy task. The only way you can really hope to deploy autonomous vehicles in these numbers is if they are disposable and you have no intention of recovering them.

Finally, what happens when a storm or, God forbid, a hurricane decides to stroll by? Are you supposed to send out crews to wrangle up the 5000 vehicles bobbing around the increasingly rough seas? Do you leave them to their fate/demise?

This whole idea wreaks of idealistic nonsense and poor engineering.