Stanford Built a Humanoid Submarine Robot To Explore a 17th-Century Shipwreck (ieee.org)

schwit1 quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Back in April, Stanford University professor Oussama Khatib led a team of researchers on an underwater archaeological expedition, 30 kilometers off the southern coast of France, to La Lune, King Louis XIV's sunken 17th-century flagship. Rather than dive to the site of the wreck 100 meters below the surface, which is a very bad idea for almost everyone, Khatib's team brought along a custom-made humanoid submarine robot called Ocean One. In this month's issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, the Stanford researchers describe in detail how they designed and built the robot, a hybrid between a humanoid and an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV), and also how they managed to send it down to the resting place of La Lune, where it used its three-fingered hands to retrieve a vase. Most ocean-ready ROVs are boxy little submarines that might have an arm on them if you're lucky, but they're not really designed for the kind of fine manipulation that underwater archaeology demands. You could send down a human diver instead, but once you get past about 40 meters, things start to get both complicated and dangerous. Ocean One's humanoid design means that it's easy and intuitive for a human to remotely perform delicate archeological tasks through a telepresence interface.

schwit1 notes: "Ocean One is the best name they could come up with?"

Comments

As Steve Jobs would say...

[OpenSourced]

Ocean One is the best name they could come up with?

That's the kind of names that happens when you concentrate on the product, and not on the marketing of it.

Re:Why always going for hominoid?

[bruce_the_loon]

I got the technical reasoning for the arm design and the stereo cameras, but the head feels unnecessarily restrictive to me. It precludes the added utility of independently steerable cameras or adjusting the distance between cameras to get an exaggerated binocular vision which can be useful for certain retrieval and manipulation operations.

I guess I always tend to think that humanoid robots are trying to do something the more difficult way than one that is built more along the functional requirements. Like using a three axis arm instead of a more flexible segmented snake that could reach into impossibly twisty gaps.

Re:Next Slashdot poll

[Snard]

I predict the top vote getter in the poll will be Botty McBotFace.