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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."
A game called Evil Genius, Robots with Shotguns, and now Underwater Robots. Must... not... make... Austin... Powers... Joke.
Its nice to see a few bucks thrown towards exploring our own planet. Sure its great to look for life on other planets, but there are still "creatures of the deep" right here waiting to be discovered. Granted this particular craft didn't have life exploration but this technology could be mass produced at that price and scour the oceans for all kinds of goodies.
There's been a lot of talk about robots around here lately, so I want to reiterate - It's all good until they become self aware!
I for one won't be satisfied until they have sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads, at which time I'll welcome our new weaponized underwater...underlords. meh.
This is great for people who want to do underwater stuff cheaply, but it isn't for everyone. When was the last time you needed an underwater robot? There are lots of people who would be able to put these to good use. There are people using underwater robots to log dead trees that were submerged by the construction of dams. Using lots of cheaper underwater robots could be a better way of doing underwater exploration than a few expensive but beefier robots.
There seems to be an awful lot of articles on robots lately. I'm beginning to worry the slashdot offices were taken over by shotgun wielding robots who have just gained underwater capabilities. Due to the robots iron grasp, this is the only way the editors can commmunicate to us their need for help against them.
http://www.commaecho.com
cornell university has a student team that competes in the same AUVSI competition, and has a pretty sweet vehicle. designed almost exclusively by engineering undergrads, with no faculty intervention, and a lot of the components and boards are designed in-house. cool sensors, cool computers, and it all runs gentoo!
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.
But do they have underwater shotguns?
Man!
Only $600 for one of these puppies. I'm getting one, underwater camera and all, for the local university pool.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
"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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Talk about clever design, this is like the Burt Rutan of underwater. I wonder if we'll see new developments on this technology, like submarine tourism, the underwater X-prize or something like that.
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.
Just think, an autonomous drug smuggling robot sub that could drop its cargo if the coast guard gets uncomfortably close, then go back and retrieve it later. And even if it were captured or destroyed, there would be nobody on board to turn state's evidence against their boss. (Presumably it would automatically wipe its memory if tampered with) About the only way to catch the smugglers in the act would be to covertly track the robot to the rendezvous point.
In the vein of the shotgun toting robot, it might make an effective military weapon as well. A tiny, autonomous sub that could navigate a pre-programmed course and deliver a nuke, launch torpedoes and drop mines at a predesignated target. Sort of an underwater cruise missile or recon drone.
My rights don't need management.
On the other hand ... being able to place underwater mines in that fashion could be valuable. Forget the wheels: just send a flock of smartbots to cover a shipping lane or a port. They might have to surface every now and then for instructions and then hide on the bottom again. If they get told: "detonate when any ship meeting sonar profile AA93 comes within range" or something like that things would get difficult for the bad guys.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If there were hundreds of them, how would you know which ones were dangerous and which were decoys?
Since they don't need to surface, they could hug the bottom of the ocean floor, coming to land somewhere convenient to detonate a payload.
Or they could attach themselves to the sides of ships and wait to stop moving (probably close to a harbor).
sigs, as if you care.
Remember that with autonomous underwater vehicles you can throw away requirements for safety of the operator and equipment to keep the driver alive. Couple that with the philosiphy that you don't care how fast it goes as long as it does science and goes somewhere eventually, and you end up with a super cheap robot.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
Ted Kennedy did this first quite some time ago, but I believe his vehicle was still manned.
"A few hundred of these, and oil transport in supertankers will no longer be feasible."
This is not economically feasible for terrorists by any stretch of the imagination. I attended the 2004 AUVSI underwater competition and while Brigham Young's appearance and attempt was commendable, the fact is that their $600 vehicle couldn't even travel in a straight line for the 15 feet needed to pass through the velidation gate. They took last place overall, with the exception of a team that was disqualified. Now, I don't want it to seem like I'm disparaging them, they had the smallest budget of any team in attendence and the smallest team as well. Brigham Young probably learned a great deal by attending the competition and will probably come back a lot stronger next year.
The fact is, to really have a functional AUV you must be prepared to spend $50k and probably a lot more than that if you want any sort of long duration capability. Why bother creating fleet of AUVs for terrorism when you can just make a suicide boat-bomb that would pack a much bigger punch.
The theat of terrorism is greatly exagerated and sensationalized in nearly every aspect of our daily lives these days. It's quite unfortunate.
This was actually our third attempt to make it from Nantucket to Bermuda, the first two launches unfortunately ran into technical problems very early into the mission.
You can see the data it sent back over the IRIDIUM phone network every seven hours at these pages:
WHOI Instument page about the SPRAY glider
Our real-time plots page
Make sure you check out the plot of velocities when it got caught in the gulf stream
Also particularly interesting are the Continuous Temperature plot
and the Continuous Salinity (salt content) profile.
And you can also view the path it took to Bermuda
We hope to launch it again early next year, possibly for a roundtrip around Bermuda.
There is actually an informative and readable press release about the glider in general and the mission it just finished.
The oil sac basically allows you to change the volume of the glider without changing the mass, by pumping the oil (think hydraulic/vegetable rather than petroleum) into the external bladder you effectively decrease the density of the instrument allowing it to rise. The pitch of the device can be controlled by moving one of the two battery packs for and aft to maintain whatever attitude is needed to create "lift" from the wings.
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.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Autocad is no longer the gorilla it used to be. Solidworks is eating their lunch, at least from what I have seen, although it is unfortunate neither one of them has embraced OSX so I can justify one of those pretty machines.
A solid modelling open source program of comparable quality would make real difference to small manufacturing companies. I am suprised nothing like this has appeared already, actually.
..don't panic
[sound of light bulb lighting]
Ah, I see. You could have a harbor full of underwater drones, like antibodies. They cruise around looking for stuff and send up warning signals.
You wouldn't want them to do anything on their own, to minimize the damage of a false positive. Blowing up a boat full of Cuban refugees might not be politically viable.
sigs, as if you care.
I changes the volume. If you consider a filled oxygen tank, the sucker is heavy and will sink like a rock. Use the oxygen inside of that tank to inflate a baloon, and it will shoot to the surface.
Yes, the mass stays the same. But that doesn't matter when it comes to buoyancy. The mass-to-volume ratio is the determining factor. May seem counterintuitive, but it works.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'