Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: Look Out Jules Verne

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are "unmanned, untethered submersible robots that are capable of carrying out missions autonomously". What's fascinating about them is that they're a little bit robotics, AI, mechanical engineering, embedded systems, sensors, and software--and a whole lot of Jules Verne.

AUV projects come in all kinds of different flavors--see the Florida Atlantic University, the University of Maine, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and others.

A couple of years ago, in fact, Dr. Dobb's published an article by Ruben Patel entitled "Remotely Controlling Windows Applications" which described an AUV project at the Institute Of Marine Research in Norway.

More recently, a team of engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology have built an underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) that they'll use to explore shipwrecks resting on the bottom of Lake Ontario and the Atlantic Ocean. The nine-member team is led by Dan Scoville, a 2005 RIT graduate who has located and explored three previously undiscovered shipwrecks in Lake Ontario in the past five years. Scoville has his sights set on two undisclosed Lake Ontario shipwrecks (one is an 1800s-era schooner--the names and precise locations of the vessels won’t be revealed until this fall) and, working with the Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, the steamship Portland, which sank off the coast of Gloucester, Mass, in 1898.

Some of the fewer than a thousand ships lost in Lake Ontario have been discovered and salvaged, while others are in water too deep to explore, Scoville says. That leaves a small number--perhaps a dozen--in the 100-to-400-foot-depth range in the area from the Niagara River to Oswego accessible to explorers such as Scoville.

The RIT ROV is a 60-pound, battery-powered vehicle equipped with up to four removable video cameras, four high-intensity lamps, a navigational compass, a timer, and sensors to measure depth, pressure and temperature. Four variable-speed motors enable vertical, forward and reverse movement and turning maneuverability. RIT students custom-built most circuit boards, wrote the software and created the graphical user interface used to control the device. All components are housed in watertight canisters (using 88 seals); a lightweight aluminum frame is rugged and modifiable.

The explorer is controlled by a joystick attached to a laptop computer that communicates with a microprocessor (the ROV’s "command center") via a 680-foot-long fiber-optic cable. A human at the controls sees what the ROV sees through live video streaming and sensor readings.

The device is capable of diving at about two feet per second to a depth of 400 feet--about twice as deep as a skilled scuba diver can descend. A foam top helps achieve neutral buoyancy, enabling the ROV to remain level while underwater. A 100-minute battery life allows it to stay underwater longer than human divers. Future enhancements may include the addition of a mechanical arm and extended diving capabilit--perhaps enabling the explorer to reach Lake Ontario’s maximum depth of about 800 feet.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 08:35 AM  Permalink