Just a short distance away from me, two astronauts are practicing for a spacewalk. I’m drifting weightlessly, in a silence broken only by my own breathing and the occasional update from Mission Control in my headset. But this isn’t the dark void of space. I’m in Houston, scuba diving in a massive swimming pool that NASA uses to train astronauts for zero-gravity environments. And though it’s a thrill to watch the space-suited figures at work, I didn’t come to see them. I’m here for a peek at Aquanaut, the bright orange robot that we’re sharing the pool with.
Aquanaut glides smoothly through the water like a miniature submarine. At first, it doesn’t seem all that different from other unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, equipped with sensors for gathering data and thrusters for propulsion. Then, in what could be a scene from the movie Transformers, the top part of the robot’s hull rises up from the base, exposing two massive arms that unfold from either side. A wedge-shaped head packed full of sensors rotates into place, and in a matter of seconds, the transformation is complete. The sleek submarine is now a half-humanoid robot, ready to get to work.
Aquanaut represents a radical new design that its creators, at a startup called Houston Mechatronics Inc. (HMI), hope will completely change subsea robotics. Conventional UUVs typically fit into two categories: torpedo-like free-swimming submersibles, which are used for long-distance survey missions, and boxy remotely operated machines, which are tethered to support vessels and used for underwater manipulation. HMI wants to combine both of these modes into a single robot. It’s a bold approach that no one has attempted before.
The HMI engineers, who often joke that building a Transformer has been one of their long-term career objectives, are convinced that it can be done. Aquanaut has been designed primarily for servicing subsea oil and gas installations. The companies that own and operate this infrastructure spend vast sums of money to inspect and maintain it. They rely on robotic technologies that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades, largely because of the challenge of working in such an extreme environment. For HMI, however, that’s not a problem: Of its 75 employees, over two dozen used to work for NASA. Extreme environments are what they’re best at.
HMI cofounder and chief technology officer Nic Radford spent 14 years working on advanced robotics projects at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston. “I’ll grant you that getting into space is harder than getting underwater,” he says. “But space is a pristine environment. Underwater, things are extraordinarily dynamic. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s 10 times harder or 50 times harder for robots working underwater than it is in space.”
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Meet Aquanaut, the Underwater Transformer 2019 rav4 | |
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| Science & Technology | Upload TimePublished on 26 Jul 2019 |
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