OceanOneK resembles a human diver from the front, with arms, hands and eyes that have 3D vision, capturing the underwater world in full color.
The back of the robot has computers and eight multi-directional thrusters that help it carefully maneuver around fragile sunken ship sites.
When an operator on the ocean surface uses controls to steer OceanOneK, the robot’s haptic (touch-based) feedback system causes the person to feel the resistance of the water as well as the contours of the artifacts.
OceanOneK’s realistic sight and touch capabilities are enough to make people feel like they are diving to the depths, without the dangers or immense underwater pressure that a human diver would experience.
Stanford University roboticist Oussama Khatib and his students teamed up with deep-sea archaeologists and began sending the robot on dives in September. The team just finished another underwater expedition in July.
So far, OceanOneK has explored a sunken Beechcraft Baron F-GDPV, an Italian steamship Le Francesco Crispi, a 2nd century Roman ship off Corsica, a World War II P-38 Lightning aircraft and a submarine named Le proteus
The Crispi is about 1,640 feet (500 meters) below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.
“You’re moving very close to this incredible structure, and something incredible happens when you touch it: you really feel it,” said Khatib, the Weichai Professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering and director of the Stanford Robotics Lab .
“I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. I can say that I’m the one who hit Crispi at 500 (meters). And I did it, I touched it, I felt it.”
OceanOneK could be just the beginning of a future where robots take on underwater exploration too dangerous for humans and help us see the oceans in a whole new way.
Creation of an underwater robot
The challenge in creating OceanOneK and its predecessor, OceanOne, was to build a robot that could withstand an underwater environment and the immense pressure at various depths, Khatib said.
OceanOne made its debut in 2016, exploring the wreck of King Louis XIV’s flagship, La Lune, which lies 328 feet (100 meters) below the Mediterranean 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of France. The shipwreck of 1664 was untouched by humans.
The robot retrieved a vase the size of a grapefruit, and Khatib felt the sensations in his hands as OceanOne touched the vase before placing it in a retrieval basket.
The idea for OceanOne arose from a desire to study the coral reefs of the Red Sea at depths beyond the normal range of divers. The Stanford team wanted to create something as close as possible to a human diver, integrating artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and haptic feedback.
The robot is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) long, and its brain can register how carefully to handle an object without breaking it, such as coral or weather artifacts in the sea. An operator can control the bot, but it is equipped with sensors and loaded with algorithms so that it can operate autonomously and avoid collisions.
While OceanOne was designed to reach maximum depths of 656 feet (200 meters), the researchers had a new goal: 1 kilometer (0.62 miles), hence the new name for OceanOneK.
The team changed the robot’s body using special foam that includes glass microspheres to increase buoyancy and combat the pressures of 1,000 meters, more than 100 times what humans experience at sea level.
The researchers upgraded the robot’s arms with an oil-and-spring mechanism that prevents compression as it descends into the ocean depths. OceanOneK also got two new hand types and increased arm and head movement.
The project includes challenges that have never been seen in any other system, said Wesley Guo, a doctoral student at Stanford’s School of Engineering. “It takes a lot of thinking outside the box to make these solutions work.”
The team used Stanford’s recreational pool to test the robot and conduct experiments, such as carrying a video camera on a boom and picking up objects. Then came the ultimate test for OceanOneK.
deep dive
A tour of the Mediterranean that began in 2021 saw OceanOneK dive to these successive depths: 406 feet (124 meters) to the submarine, 1,095 feet (334 meters) to the remains of the Roman ship, and finally 0 .5 miles (852 meters) to prove it has the capability. diving almost 1 kilometer away. But it was not without problems.
Guo and another Stanford PhD student, Adrian Piedra, had to fix one of the robot’s disabled arms on the deck of their ship overnight during a storm.
“For me, the robot has been eight years in the making,” Piedra said. “You have to understand how every part of this robot works – what are all the things that can go wrong and things always go wrong. So it’s always like a puzzle. Being able to dive into the ocean and explore some shipwrecks that they would never have seen each other so closely is very rewarding.”
During OceanOneK’s deep dive in February, team members discovered the robot could not ascend when they stopped to check the thruster. The power and communications line floats had collapsed, causing the line to pile up on top of the robot.
They were able to pull through and OceanOneK’s takedown was a success. He dropped a commemorative marker on the sea floor that reads: “The first touch of a robot on the deep sea floor / A vast new world for humans to explore.”
Khatib, a computer science teacher, called the experience an “amazing journey”. “This is the first time a robot has been able to go that deep, interact with the environment and allow the human operator to feel that environment,” he said.
In July, the team revisited the Roman ship and the Crispus. While the first is almost gone, its cargo remains scattered across the seabed, Khatib said. At the site of the Roman ship, OceanOneK successfully collected ancient vases and oil lamps, which still bear the name of their maker.
The robot carefully placed a boom camera inside the Crispi’s fractured hull to capture video of corals and rust formations as bacteria ate away at the ship’s iron.
“We go all the way to France for the expedition, and there, surrounded by a much larger team, coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, you realize that the piece of this robot you’ve been working on at Stanford it’s actually part of something much bigger,” Piedra said.
“You get a sense of how important this is, how new and significant the dive will be, and what this means for science in general.”
A promising future
The project born from an idea in 2014 has a long future of planned expeditions to lost underwater cities, coral reefs and deep wrecks. OceanOneK’s innovations also laid the foundation for safer underwater engineering projects, such as ship, dock and pipeline repair.
An upcoming mission will explore a sunken steamship in Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia.
But Khatib and his team have even bigger dreams for the project: space.
Khatib said the European Space Agency has expressed interest in the robot. A haptic device aboard the International Space Station would allow astronauts to interact with the robot.
“They can interact with the robot deep in the water,” Khatib said, “and that would be amazing because that would simulate the task of doing that on a different planet or a different moon.”