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Jeremy Weirich: Navigation
The images that you see here is me working as a navigator for the Titanic Expedition. I sat at the very right corner of the control lab. There is usually the ROV pilot sitting right next to me. The large screen in front of me is what we had to look at, what the ROV is looking at. Its sort of the pilot's eyes. And it is my job to make sure that the two ROVs, Hercules and Argus, and the ship, and the wreck, are all sort of 'georeferenced', or maintained by one another. That means that the two ROVs don't get tangled up in the wreck, and the Ron Brown, the ship that we were using to operate the vehicles, is a safe distance away from the site.
As a navigator, there are two software packages that I use. Both display the ROVs, the wreck, and the mother ship the Ron Brown, and where they are in relationship to one another. That type of software helps us to make sure that the two vehicles down below don't get tangled up with one another, or that they don't get tangled up in the wreck.
On one of the screens that I am operating from is a program called DVL NAV. This helps orient the two vehicles, the ship, and the wreck. On the screen in front of me, it gives the orientation of one of the vehicles, Hercules. It gives the depth and direction, and where it is in relation to everything else. And that’s one of the main things that the pilot steers by.
In front of us, there are 3 large plasma screen TV’s, and they give us different views than the cameras on the ROVs can see. Some look straight ahead, some look from behind. There are also the images from both ROVs, Argus and Hercules. Usually, Hercules works below Argus, and that perception from Argus looking down, really gives us a big panoramic view of where Hercules is in relation to the wreck.
What was interesting in working with Titanic is that you had this huge superstructure rising up out of the bottom, almost to 30 meters. That made it difficult for the ROV pilot to navigate around it. The pilot had to make sure he didn't hit anything in front of it, behind it, or above it. As a navigator, it was my job to make sure that the ROVs were all in unison of one another. And in this case, on the plasma screens in front of me, the ROVs are looking at some rusted holes, on a large piece of the superstructure. There is a porthole in the background with rust hanging down In front of it. We were doing a corrosion assessment, determining the rate of degradation.
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