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MHT Emerging Technologies Forum: Robotics
One of the most contentious questions following the sinking of a deep-water oil rig that has sent millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico has been how far the oil will spread. The oil slick on the surface can readily be seen in satellite images, but the underwater plumes may extend for miles below the surface, at depths difficult to reach by manned submarine.
Submarines that can operate at these depths are typically unmanned vehicles that glide along the bottom, collecting data from instruments mounted on board. New England is a mecca for the design, development and manufacture of these subs: Robots from Teledyne Webb Research Corp. in East Falmouth and iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) in Bedford have already been deployed in Gulf waters, skimming near the surface or diving deep for data. And in the field of autonomous underwater vehicles, a third Massachusetts company is the nearly uncontested sales leader. According to a report on the global AUV fleet from industry researcher Douglas-Westwood Research Co. of New York, Hydroid LLC has sold more than any of its competitors.
The Pocasset company, acquired in 2009 by Norwegian marine, oil and gas, and defense contractor Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, has licensed much of its best technology from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Woods Hole developed technology used in the REMUS 6000, an AUV that dives as low as 6,000 meters to collect information on the sea and the sea floor. To make a submersible that can handle the intense water pressure at that depth is challenging, because the vessel must also be able to float to the surface in the event of a propulsion failure. Woods Hole researchers replaced the legacy titanium pressure hull with a dense syntactic foam. Inside the foam, navigation systems, sensors and batteries are individually housed in smaller titanium pressure hulls, fixed to a titanium frame that runs the length of the vehicle.
“When you look at the vehicle at a distance, you would think it’s aluminum or metal,” said sales engineer Ernest Petzrick. “But when you tap on it, you realize it’s foam.”
So far, Hydroid’s vehicles have not been used by the oil and gas industry, said vice president of sales and marketing Kevin McCarthy. The company’s biggest sales so far have come from its smallest class of AUVs, the REMUS 100s, which can be carried between two people and have been used by the U.S. Navy to map minefields at sea, McCarthy said.
The REMUS 6000 could measure oil plumes, but so far has had other specialized uses, McCarthy said. The company has not built Remus 6000s with sensors for oil-industry applications, but the devices have been used to map deepwater corals, to search for the wreckage of Amelia Earhardt’s plane, and to search for the wreckage of an Air France passenger jet that crashed off the coast of Brazil last year.
“There are very few groups around the world that are really working that deep,” McCarthy said.
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