Exploring the deep ocean is not easy. It's dark,
it's cold. You can't breathe. The pressure is extremely high.
It's a really hostile environment for humans,
kind of like outer space.
So to learn more about what lives in the ocean and how it affects us,
scientists need special tools like underwater robots.
These tools are designed and built to explore ecosystems and gather information
about marine life and unusual features
like seafloor, hot springs called hydrothermal vents. The images,
videos, and other data they collect help scientists,
understand ocean habitats and how the marine environment changes.
Don't you just love seeing these images coming back from the deep ocean.
These are things we've never seen before.
I'm Debi Blaney,
let's look at these tools and who builds them and how they work and what the
future of ocean exploration may look like.
Today ocean explorers mostly use two kinds of tools,
autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs that run on battery power.
And they look like torpedoes or little submarines.
They swim through the water for hours and days along a programmed course.
And some can hover like a blimp. Others glide up and down on the ocean currents.
And sometimes AUVs even allow for very interesting encounters.
Scientists use AUVs to map the sea floor and sample the water.
And because they can last for hours or days,
we're able to explore larger parts of the ocean more efficiently.
The second kind of underwater robots it's called remotely operated vehicles
or ROVs. ROVs
Have lights and cameras to help scientists see what's in the water and on the
sea floor,
they send data and video back to the ship with a long flexible cable,
kind of like a huge underwater extension cord.
Many ROVs have mechanical arms to collect samples of plants,
animals, and rocks, and they may be new to science.
Scientists can put different kinds of sensors on ROVs,
depending on they are exploring.
In this Dee-Sea Dialogue series we want to talk to the people who are out in the
field doing this work. Let's talk to Jessica Sandoval. She's an ROV
pilot.
As an ROV Pilot, I work to one kind of mechanically,
electrically maintain these vehicles when they're on the deck.
And when they're in the water to really have a lot of fun flying them
underwater or manipulating using these large robotic arms that we have on board.
Manipulators
were developed for kind of an oil and gas applications initially. Well,
they're very, very strong. They have 500 lbs of grip for some of them.
So some researchers have actually been looking into how to provide maybe
manipulators underwater with delicate grip to make more of
a gentle sample collection.
So not only is an ROV good for getting kind of beautiful shots of an underwater
landscape or seascape,
but it's also useful for taking these really intricate samples.
Jessica, the ROVs you operate are huge!
How do you get them in the water and then fly them underwater?
So in order to launch and recover these vehicles, it really takes a team.
So we have folks on deck that are using cranes or winches
in order to pull these really heavy vehicles and put them in the water or to put
them back on deck.
So these ROVs are quite large for reference think about
a car. Putting a car under water.
It's about the best analogy that you have for, for one of the vehicles.
And so there's really an orchestra of people that it takes to
put these vehicles in the water and recover them safely. For us,
how we fly these large vehicles underwater is it's all kind of dependent on a
buoyancy system. Buoyancy meaning
that you want to make sure the thing kind of floats.
So interesting, Jessica. You have an awesome job,
but the ocean is so vast look tools.
Do you have to find what you're looking for?
And not only do we use an ROV in order to explore the sea floor,
but we also do things such as multibeam,
which is basically scanning the sea floor, using sonar.
Painting a picture of this large landscape.
So we can see features that we couldn't resolve before or didn't know were there
before. That's
the really incredible thing about the multibeam system that we use on ships.
Kind of the future of ocean exploration is having more of an autonomous
setting or having an autonomous vehicle perhaps that is able to maintain a
station and maintain a survey perhaps at one location for a
long period of time.
Now I'm curious, Jessica, do ROVs ever have bad days? Like,
do they break down underwater?
ROVs do definitely experience bad days underwater.
They do break down in a way,
but then that's why we have a large team of ROV pilots and
engineers that can that
are very well trained in repairing them.
Wow, all that sounds so amazing. Thank you, Jessica,
for spending time with us today and good luck on your next expedition.
The ocean is so vast.
It really takes more than one type of tool to explore it as well as many
different backgrounds and skillsets. What we just learned from Jessica,
how she is building tools to use on large ROVs,
Dr. Phillips is focused on something else. He's innovating smaller,
cheaper,
easier to operate tools that may lead to a whole new field of ocean engineering.
As an engineer, as ocean engineers.
We're really starting to question some of the fundamental ways that
tools are made for exploring the deep ocean. When you have a good idea,
you should run with that and not be slowed down as much as possible.
You should be able to try that out and maybe it doesn't work,
throw it against the wall. If it doesn't work, move on to the next, you know,
that sort of iterative process is what we're enabled to do here in my lab.
So tell me, why are you developing these smaller tools to explore the ocean?
The state of the art of deep sea exploration technology, right? Large,
world-class ROVs and submersibles and all that sort of thing.
Those are really on the scale of space programs. I mean,
they're not funded as well, you know, as sending rockets to the moon,
to the international space station,
but they are funded at a scale that really only a handful of countries can
afford. We're coming up with ways to make them ourselves.
Once we figure out these formulas, these recipes for making things ourselves,
it really opens the doors. We can, you know,
rapidly change and augment modify things. And then when it does work, it's new,
whatever we do is totally new to science.
Well, Brennan, I'm really fascinated by your work.
So tell us more about some of the innovative tools you've been working on,
which one are you really proud of?
Really, it's sort of just serendipitous that we live in a time now where,
the capabilities of 3D printing and rapid prototyping are so good that you
can make a lot of your things yourself, you know,
coming at things from a very creative angle of bringing in people that maybe
don't normally work in oceanography.
Really by chance I happened to be a postdoc at the same time, in a lab,
up at Harvard, with an origami roboticist. The idea is that,
you can have a multi-faced geometry that can open and close. Well,
he had this really innovative idea that you could have a folding dodecahedron.
You're showing a prototype working.
That can use one motor that turns a little bit,
and then can completely encapsulate a deep-sea animal. That
worked.
And that was all enabled through somebody who had never worked in oceanography,
talking to somebody like me, who knew how to make things work underwater. Okay.
So we're a good team there.
And then having a really good 3D printer that could rapidly make this geometry,
which is very complex and had to fail a lot. You know,
we went through many iterations before actually coming up with something that
could be at this size and can actually go underwater.
And it's all enabled by the formulas we have in the lab to make this really
unique,
totally new sort of thing that probably other folks thought we couldn't even
make. And I can tell you, we have.
What do you personally think the future of underwater robots looks like?
We're really establishing a new discipline. To be honest, I feel like,
I think we're really entering a new phase, a new sort of approach.
And that takes confidence. You know, you got to learn how to,
you got to learn how to walk before you can run.
And so we are learning how to walk right now with a lot
of these early successes that we have here in the lab.
Then now we can do something like the RAD sampler here,
which I kind of consider we're running now with that, that, that,
that's what it's all about. Um,
who knows what will be five or 10 years from now? Both myself and my peers.
You know, there's, there's the, sky's the limit.
It sounds like you and Jessica are really putting together the unexplored
puzzle. That is our ocean and creating a clearer picture of it. New
technologies and the people who are designing them are making robots more
nimble, easier to build and able to explore more remote parts of our ocean. And
someday, maybe oceans on other planets.
What do you want to know about the ocean?
Maybe a robot will bring back the answer soon.