A proliferation of uncrewed surface and underwater platforms are providing new ways to obtain acoustic data in the ocean, offering increased spatial and temporal coverage and access to unexplored areas. There are challenges to effectively exploiting robotic platforms for fisheries acoustics including difficulties in integrating relatively large, high power draw scientific echosounders into these platforms and the need to provide alternative evidence for target identification in the absence of trawling vessels. Recent experiments that integrated a constellation of robotic platforms and a cabled observatory to describe the abundance, distribution, and behavior of pelagic animals illustrate both the opportunities and challenges. Echosounders were employed from a variety of uncrewed platforms, letting us examine the tradeoffs of active acoustic sensing from each platform. Echosounder sampling was complemented by targeted environmental DNA sampling and quantitative video transects from autonomous underwater vehicles to provide information on target taxa and size classes. Together, these data revealed new details on the daily vertical reorganization of life in the pelagic. Creatively exploiting the strengths of these new platforms rather than attempting to (poorly) replicate ship-based sampling is key to leveraging the robot revolution in ocean sciences.