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Underwater Robots for Everyone
Dirak writes "A small 112-pound ocean glider named Spray is the first autonomous underwater vehicle to cross the Gulf Stream underwater. Launched September 11, 2004, it has been slowly making 12 miles per day measuring various properties of the ocean. Spray spent 15 minutes three times a day on the surface to relay its position and information about ocean conditions and then glided back down to 3,300-feet depth ." And reader RoboFreak writes "Two Computer Science students at Brigham Young University-Hawaii have developed a Low Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. The students also entered their robot, LUV, in the AUVSI and ONR's 7th International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition at San Diego, CA and competed against top Ivy-League teams. Their robot received recognition in the form of an award at this competition. This robot was designed with a budget of only about $600 and seems to be the cheapest AUV around. One of the AUV designers' interview conducted by Amit Kr Chanda of The Times of India is available here."
As a studying EE stuff like this facinates me.
Just uses a small Li Ion battery to change its relative density to float or sink..it jsut does this at 45 degrees to make forward progress. No prop or anything.
Stuff like this is NOT easy to do, although quite a bit easier that a land vehicle that has to navigate an obstacle course at speed. But to have these little guys make long distance treks MULTIPLE times while doing very well to keep its line and make measurements while its going it..VERY good engineering for the amount of money spent.
I wonder if they ever have a problem with ocean life? Plenty of larger fish and sharks in that water..would be kind of funny/sad if one got eaten.
They say in the webpage about it that one got ran over by a surface vehicle and still completed it run, since it has an antenna in each wing and only one wing was damaged.
I say again, this is great engineering.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Man!
Only $600 for one of these puppies. I'm getting one, underwater camera and all, for the local university pool.
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"Refueling cost ~ $3000"
And we thought oil was expensive?!?!
No, they just create new land using infilling. Create a concrete wall around the area you want, pump out the water, and fill the space with whatever you have available (garbage, dirt, sand, dredged up silt, blown up mountains). That gives you several levels of basements, plus land ready for the construction of airports, office blocks and shopping malls. And you solve coastal erosion at the same time.
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I feel compelled to point out the work that Cornell students are doing in AUV development. We have a student project team called CUAUV, http://www.cuauv.org/. Our vehicle, in its fourth generation is capabile of extended deployments and real-world missions in deep water.
CUAUV showcases its work annually at the international AUV competition held at the Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems facility (SPAWAR) in San Diego. The competition is organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Cornell won the 2003 competition, placed second in 2004 and 2002, and is one of the most consistently innovative and successful teams to participate each year.
Although the competition provides an excellent framework for the development of our platform, we pride ourselves on our submarine's capability to perform a wide range of missions beyond the scope of the competition. A single trial in the competition is often as short as fifteen minutes, but our submarine can easily perform a six-hour continuous mission. We have taken great care to keep our vehicle platform robust and modular - competitive with the best commercial AUVs available today. Our vehicle serves as an advanced research platform, and we are continually looking to develop new partnerships within the research community.
Some of the comments here are along the same lines I was thinking...does one have to clear this sort of thing with homeland security or the coast guard? I didn't see anything to that effect on the main Spray site.
would be an interesting thing, though...looking at the shape and size of the thing, and considering that it makes a regular phone call via sattelite. Wow. that might be mistaken for something different altogether...
Actually,
AUVs are on the other side in the "war on terror". A major application for AUVs is harbor security. Think about a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles assigned to a harbor. The vehicles, with a diverse sensor suite composed of vision and sonar subsystems, patrol the harbor looking for unusual activity. When a ship enters the harbor a few vehicles will swarm it and scan the hull. They can be equipped with sensors like giger counters to detect suspicious cargo.
This system would also be self-maintaining. These AUVs could autonomously dock themselves to recharge their batteries when low, or to report log data to an oversight system which would combine all the log data from the vehicles and use more computationally involved algorithms to analyse the state of operations of the harbor. If anything was suspicious looking, the video/sonar logs can be looked at by humans who would have the final call in any real actions.
Underwater autonomous submarines? We're not talking about a large jump to underwater cruise missiles here. Or autonomous attack submarines like the Predator drone. WOuldn't be too hard to program a few to sneak into enemy waters and hunt down shipping at random or launch bulk cruise torpedo strike from hald way around the world to destroy enemy ports and warships.
Frankly, I'm still waiting for the Catamaran Aircraft Carrier.
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