Page 38: of Marine Technology Magazine (January 2022)

SUBSEA VEHICLES WHOI ORPHEUS

Orpheus had only done three dives. It was Eurydice’s ? rst salt- gineers Andy Klesh and Russel Smith from JPL. TRN works water outing. by using software to pick up unique features in what the cam-

The surveys covered coral mounds on the Blake Plateau, in- era sees and then uses them as navigation aids, tracking and vestigated coral distribution that hadn’t been investigated be- following them. “It constructs a network of features on the fore and brought back 700GB of high-resolution video. “But sea? oor (even just sand ripples),” says Shank, “and as we roll what’s important for us is that we demonstrated really reliable along the sea? oor with the vehicle, it connects all these dots autonomous control near and on the bottom,” says Shank. “It and basically makes a feature map for us, which is simply was a ? rst chance we really got to test heading and altitude amazing, because at 10,000 m full ocean depth there’s little and the ability to land the vehicle. AUVs don’t really want to we can do with traditional way of acoustic navigation. What touch bottom, but this one does, so it can survey an area and we plan to do is combine this with the visual camera data we then land on the bottom and do additional work. We demon- have to make 3D sea? oor maps to centimeter or even millime- strated that control in a fantastic way.” ter scale. So we’re super excited about this.”

Image-based terrain relative navigation TRN can be done with a small cheap camera – machine vi-

The mission also helped to demonstrate and advance the sion cameras are in the order of $1700, says Machado. While

TRN capability, on which WHOI has been working with en- it’s not a complete navigation solution – some acoustics will

Image by Luis Lamar, courtesy of OceanX Media 38 January/February 2022

MTR #1 (34-49).indd 38 1/25/2022 9:09:10 AM