Introduction to Underwater Robotics
“You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know.” — Peter Benchley
From the early days of humanity, waterways has been a vital paintbrush in drawing the path of our species. It has been theorized that early man migrated out of Africa following prehistoric rivers in the Sahara fed by monsoon rains. Every early civilization from the Indus Valley to Egypt settled along fertile river valleys. As technology progressed our ancestors made long sea trade routes possible. These trade routes still are the backbone of international shipping. In broad terms one might say that we as a species have conquered the surface but the underwater realm is a wholly different story.
The deep sea biome is unlike anything that can be found on the surface. It is a wholly different ecosystem with exotic species that were unknown to humans until recent times. A majority of these underwater locations are undiscovered and it is said that we know more about our immediate extraterrestrial space than our own oceans. The first deep-sea creatures weren’t discovered until 1864 when undersea cables were being developed. Following this the Challenger Expedition between 1872 and 1876 discovered as many as 4000 previously unknown species.
As technology has progressed new areas have opened up in underwater research. Offshore shallow water oil rigs were first conceived in 1891 and currently more than 600 offshore projects are out in the oceans. Interest is also rapidly increasing in the deeper depths of the oceans as potential for underwater mining is surfacing. But not everything underwater is commercial exploitation as there are also huge amounts of unfortunate history buried under the sea. Underwater wrecks have been very popular hotspots with the RMS Titanic being the most visited. Canadian director James Cameron has himself dived deep into the Titanic for his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss. It wasn’t the last time he had taken an interest in deep water research either, in 2012 James Cameron became the first man to have landed in Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the Mariana Trench.
Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
The vast majority of the ocean floor is too hostile for human explorers, therefore the future of Deep Sea Exploration lies in these Unmanned Underwater Vehicles. As the name suggests these vehicles do not carry human passengers and thus can be made as compact as possible
Two major classes exist in this category namely Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV), which are tethered to the surface and have human operators maneuvering and overlooking the bot in real time, and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), which doesn’t rely on a human operator and navigates the depth of the seas on it own. Both of these variants have found uses in research, military and oceanography.
The development of underwater vehicles began in the early 1960s within the US Navy for the collection of sunken equipment. One of the first few prototype the Cable-controlled Undersea Recovery Vehicle or the CURV gained particular renown when it successfully recovered a Mk-28 Hydrogen Bomb that was submerged off the coast of Spain after a mid-air collision. The ROV found and recovered the bomb 880 meters underwater.
Modern Vehicles have come a long way from their predecessors. Nereus a hybrid ROV designed and constructed in 2009 dove to the murky depths of the Mariana Trench reaching a record depth of 10,902 meters. Industrial ROVs are certainly the peak of ROV design but that shouldn’t avert one’s attention away from hobbyist Engineers who have been working and developing vehicles similar to hobby Aerial Drones. A project called OpenROV which released in 2012, revolutionized this industry with it’s off the shelf compatibility, DIY Kits and fully open source designs so Underwater Vehicles could be created by not just industry experts. It brought ROVs into education and has skyrocketed interest of students in the field of marine exploration.
So what lies ahead?
Mining, Exploration, Search and Rescue the possibilities for Underwater Robotics is infinite. A vast majority of the Oceans are unknown to humans. We are slowly trying to extend our grasp over these untouched territories. One of the many visionary projects working towards this goal is The C-bot Project from the National Institute of Oceanography, India. This project aims to combat and monitor the affects of climate change on coral reefs. The team at NIO is working to create several shallow water AUVs that can transect coral reefs in waters as low as 1m of depth and requires only a single operator for deployment
Underwater Robotics are also a huge part of what seems a rather unrelated field, that is deep space exploration. NASA has been using ROVs to simulate what they seem to predict exploration of outer solar system moons like Europa and Enceladus will be like. The Lō`ihi seamount near the Hawaii Islands, USA is an underwater volcano that is being explored by this NASA mission called the Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog (or SUBSEA). The mission has deployed two ROVs the Hercules and Argos in an attempt to understand the challenges of such environments and hopefully help in planning of future space exploration missions.
The distant depths of the ocean have concealed many secrets since the age of humanity. Only now are we discovering this hidden heritage of primordial life that was left behind by evolution. The oceans don’t only hold the secrets of life but also Earth’s early history, and you would never find Atlantis if just search the surface
