OceanOne, a Mer-Bot Dive Buddy With a 'Friendly Face'

Fri, May 20th 2016, 09:58 AM


A submersible robot in human form, developed at Stanford University, completed its first dive, recovering a 17th-century vase. By SAMANTHA STARK and JAMES GORMAN. Also by Kurt Hickman/Stanford News.

It’s not every submersible that does a star turn at the Marseille History Museum after its maiden dive. But then OceanOne, designed by computer scientists at Stanford University, doesn’t look like your average machine.

It has arms and hands of a sort, and a head with wide eyes to accommodate two cameras that give it stereo vision — the better to watch what its hands are doing. It is equipped with artificial intelligence so it can do things like avoid obstacles on its own. But a human does operate it from the surface. And, as Oussama Khatib, who designed OceanOne points out, “It has a friendly face.”

On its maiden voyage in the Mediterranean, Dr. Khatib, a Stanford computer scientist, was the human who operated it from a boat. The robot is equipped with haptic, or touch, feedback so the operator can judge the force of the hands’ grip, for example. That’s important when you are retrieving a 17th-century vase, as it did on its first dive, at the end of April.

Dr. Khatib, who specializes in robots in humanoid form, said no other diving robot has arms, elbows hands and vision like OceanOne.

“We have wonderful underwater vehicles for sure,” he said. “Progress in robotic mobility has been amazing. They can see, they can map, they can discover new shipwrecks. But they cannot do.”

He designed OceanOne to meet the needs of researchers studying deep coral reefs in the Red Sea. The robot can go deeper than human divers can go comfortably and into more dangerous spots. It works well for archaeology, too; thus its first dive was to a shipwreck.

The humanoid form, Dr. Khatib said, enables fine control of grasping movements, and makes it intuitive for a person to operate. “We are creating your avatar,” he said.

Humans working alongside OceanOne tend to relate to it almost as if it were a dive buddy, Dr. Khatib said. And the operator is able to communicate with those divers by using hand signs.

OceanOne does lack two human attributes — legs. Like a merman or mermaid, its aft end is devoted to propulsion, although it uses thrusters rather than a tail.

By James Gorman

Source: NY Times

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