RAV.B | Extreme Vehicles Under the Sea

It’s finally happening, science fiction was right:  the robots are taking over!

As we have discussed before, working and living under the ocean can, at times, be quite dangerous.  From the challenges of living in an underwater habitat in close quarters with five other people for weeks at a time to having to deal with potentially dangerous marine life, to the physical issues that come with working under pressure on the bottom, sometimes it helps to have someone else do some of the heavy lifting.  The same thing is true in space or on the surface of the moon or Mars or asteroids or anywhere else that it’s either too dangerous or too expensive to send people; sometimes you just need someone – or something – else to do it for you.

Enter, The Robots

You’re probably familiar with the name Curiosity, as in the Curiosity Rover that landed on Mars in August of 2012 and has been doing some truly astonishing research that humans aren’t capable of doing at this point. But it’s not just the Curiosity up there.

Humans have been landing rovers and probes on Mars since Viking landed way back in 1976, and they have been giving us amazing insights that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Similarly, there are parts of the ocean that we couldn’t explore without underwater robots more commonly known as AUVs and ROVs.

AUVs, or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, usually conduct underwater survey missions during which they detect and map submerged wrecks, rocks, and obstructions that can be a hazard to work or navigation to commercial and recreational vehicles and divers. The great thing about these robotic explorers is that they can be dropped – gently – into the ocean and then navigate on their own, exploring the area and returning home when their mission is complete.

They can be programmed to cover a selected area of ocean for a predetermined period of time and use onboard sensors to avoid bashing into the very things they’ve been assigned to survey or seek out.

Once they get back home, all of the information they’ve collected can be downloaded and processed by the human crew that has been waiting, warm and dry on the surface, or sort of warm and mostly dry in the Aquarius habitat.

Whereas the AUV is a smart fellow, the ROV is a bit of a dummy and needs a human at the controls at all times. Really, an ROV, or, a Remote Operated Vehicle, is an extension of its human handlers. Instead of sending a human down to a specific location either too deep or too dangerous to visit, the crew can use the ROV to directly survey the targets, controlling the robot, well, remotely!

Also, ROVs are tethered to a mother ship by control and communication cables. One of the main advantages to an ROV over the AUV is that ROVs are far less expensive and more easily maintained.

One particular example of ROVs used by aquanauts was during NEEMO Mission 15, in 2011. Even before the aquanauts were on the Hab, they sent an AUV to the sea floor to map hundreds of meters of the coral reef surrounding the Hab. By doing this, they could analyze the data and plan future missions more efficiently. This is very similar to what would be done on a mission to a near-Earth asteroid, prior to a spacewalk.

In the next section we’ll talk about some of the coolest undersea robots in use today.