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General Robotics Forum - All aspects of robots and their applications.
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Posted by Too_Many_Tools on June 3, 2009, 11:31 pm
FYI...
Has anyone built anything like this?
TMT
Impressive ROV...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090603/sc_livescience/subsetsrecordindivetooceansdeepesttrench;_ylt=AiSpY.rCCX_xc3BV51IH5tmCfNdF
Sub Sets Record in Dive to Ocean's Deepest Trench
LiveScience Staff
livescience.com Wed Jun 3, 10:18 am ET
A robotic vehicle named Nereus has made the deepest ocean dive ever -
6.8 miles (10,902 meters), a team of scientists and engineers reported
yesterday. At this depth, Nereus was able to explore the Challenger
Deep - the ocean's lowest point, located in the Mariana Trench in the
western Pacific.
Nereus took the plunge Sunday. It was the first exploration of the
Marina Trench since 1998.
"Much of the ocean's depths remain unexplored," said Julie Morris,
director of the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean
Sciences, which funded the project. "Ocean scientists now have a
unique tool to gather images, data and samples from everywhere in the
oceans, rather than those parts shallower than 6,500 meters (4 miles).
With its innovative technology, Nereus allows us to study and
understand previously inaccessible ocean regions."
Nereus is a new type of ocean vehicle, called a hybrid remotely
operated vehicle (HROV). It is controlled by scientists aboard a
surface ship via a fiber-optic tether. In addition to being able to
dive deep, Nereus can also switch to a free swimming mode.
"The team is pleased that Nereus has been successful in reaching the
very bottom of the ocean to return imagery and samples from such a
hostile world" said Andy Bowen, project manager and principal
developer of Nereus at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI). "With a robot like Nereus we can now explore anywhere in the
ocean. The trenches are virtually unexplored, and Nereus will enable
new discoveries there."
Nereus has a lightweight tethering system. A traditional system uses
steel-reinforced cable made of copper that powers a vehicle, and
optical fibers that enable information to be passed between the ship
and the vehicle. But if such a cable were used to reach the Mariana
Trench, it would snap under its own weight before it traveled that
deep.
To solve the problem, the Nereus team adapted fiber-optic technology
developed by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific
to carry real-time video and other data between the Nereus and the
surface crew. Close to the diameter of a human hair and with a
breaking strength of only 8 pounds, the tether is composed of glass
fiber with a very thin protective jacket of plastic.
WHOI engineers also developed a hydraulically operated, lightweight
robotic manipulator arm that could operate under intense pressure.
Overall, the deep-diving vehicle weighs nearly 3 tons in air and is
about 14 feet (4.25 meters) long and about 8 feet (2.3 meters) wide.
It is powered by more than 4,000 lithium-ion batteries.
During its dive to the Challenger Deep, Nereus spent more than 10
hours on the bottom. It sent live video back to the ship through its
fiber-optic tether and collected biological and geological samples
with its manipulator arm.
"The samples collected by the vehicle include sediment from the
tectonic plates that meet at the trench and, for the first time, rocks
from deep exposures of the Earth's crust close to mantle depths south
of the Challenger Deep," said geologist Patty Fryer of the University
of Hawaii, who also went on the expedition. "We will know the full
story once shore-based analyses are completed back in the laboratory
this summer. We can integrate them with the new mapping data to tell a
story of plate collision in greater detail than ever before
accomplished in the world's oceans."
Nereus was also funded by the Office of Naval Research, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Russell Family Foundation
and WHOI.
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