Have been doing a little work — since I’m getting paid for it — for a small camera-carrying UROV.

Ash has pointed me at some neat stuff from "Make" magazine, and it’s pretty close to the "plumbers nightmare" I was cobbling together for bathroom experiments.

With "unmanned exploration" it’s a good idea to rely on simple design, static stability and as few moving parts as possible.

So the basic concept v1.0 is a near neutral-boyancy vehicle capable of up/down and MAYBE a little forward/backward motion via an outboard thruster, with 1-time detachable lead ballast for emergency  payload recovery (e.g. falls off  if battery goes offline), and a small onboard air tank to (mostly 1-time) blow out water ballast.

Mostly things are open to the sea, and the worst that can happen if something goes wrong is the thing comes to the surface.

OK, if it really goes wrong it goes to the bottom along with your client’s $30K camera.

The bot is just a 2 ft cubed cage containing the boyancy tanks, the electronics, a thruster or 2, and a couple of fixed down-pointing LED lights, with the camera pod underslung and designed to FIRMLY hold a self-contained remote-operated camera in a cylindrical pressure box.

At present I’m aiming at very low-bitrate sonic communciation for movement. Have got no good ideas for getting any targetting video back. Client is suggesting the old cable for everything, but he also has indicated he likes wreck diving, so I was kinda hoping for something that would NOT be dragging anything born-to-be-snagged.

Haven’t tested the comms in the sea, yet, but I’m given to understand some diver2diver systems are based on something akin to modulated 40 khz (+- 3khz transducers.

In a large tub, a 1/2-sized model manages to maintain neutral boyancy.

A home-made pizzo pressure guage SHOULD be good enough to operate upto about 20 m — the deeper parts of the Melbourne bay area.

At present my camera is a Sony via crustcrawler.com, good to 500 ft.

http://crustcrawler.com/products/cameras/index.php?prod=70 

The client has much more expensive gear with bluetooth controls. Don’t know what I’ll do to handle that.

I’m awaiting thrusters allegedly tested to 1000 ft (presently playing with home-made things sealed in plastic tubing, maybe good to the bottom of a swimming pool .

http://www.crustcrawler.com/products/urov/index.php?prod=300

Pix will be attached when the glue hardens from the latest re-working.

In the meantime, I’ve attached pix from the 2006 unmanned underwater vehicle comp:

http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/2006/06photo_gallery.cfm

Elsewhere, I’ve run across a neat little platform for one of my projects.

After apparently scouring the web for a few weeks, the client with the 30k camera gear found the SRV-1 – a relatively high-powered arm bd with a separate vision processor, all on a small tank-tread bot.  

The company’s website is http://surveyor.com/, with the current product spec at http://www.surveyor.com/SRV_info.html .

The present version of the h/w features a 60 MHz ARM7 connected to an Omnivision camera with vision processor, plus the usual slew of wifi i/f, IR rangefinder, and running C and Java.

The beauty part is the company is about to upgrade to a 500 MHz Blackfin running Linux 2.6 and a 1.3 mp camera on the same body. Allegedly (according to contacts) the upgrade will come in at around $US150 or less.  

So I’ve ordered one of the old model via Trossenrobotics, and – magically – I’ve just received the email saying it’s been shipped.