May 14 will see the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer embark on an expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration to explore the deep ocean. The mission will also demonstrate the new technology that involves an autonomous underwater vehicle.
Dubbed Orpheus, the submersible robot will show a system that can come in handy to navigate and identify scientific features on the seafloor. Terrain-relative navigation was also useful in landing NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The system enabled the robot to map the Red Planet’s surface to find out the safest place to land.
Orpheus is light yet powerful
Developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the vision-based navigation system will be used a little closer to home this time — East Coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
Orpheus is lighter than most deep-sea submersibles, thanks to its low-power system of cameras and lights, aided with advanced software. It weighs around 250 kg and is easy to operate, and can access places that aren’t possible in most vehicles.
JPL and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution came together to design this advanced navigation system. It is capable of working untethered in the most extreme depths of the ocean. The project team aims to build 3D maps by leveraging these robots for vast regions that are yet to be explored.
“This tech demo will be used to gather data to demonstrate the viability of terrain-relative navigation in the ocean while also showing how multiple robots will operate together in extreme environments,” said Russell Smith, robotics mechanical engineer at JPL. “These tests will put us on track to start future dives into the hadal zone and intelligently seek out exciting regions of high biological activity.”
Future team of navigation robots
Orpheus’ vision-based navigation is called visual-inertial odometry, or xVIO. It has a host of advanced cameras backed by pattern-matching software to accurately measure its motion.
The maps created by xVIO are saved in the memory so they can be used if Orpheus revisits the area. And when there are more functional robots, maps can be shared, enabling researchers to quickly identify areas of interest.
“In the future, some of the most extreme ocean environments will be within our reach. From deep ocean trenches to hydrothermal vents, there are many new destinations we will explore,” said Andy Klesh, a systems engineer at JPL. “By staying small, we’ve created a new, simplified tool for ocean scientists – one that directly benefits NASA as an analogue system for autonomous space exploration.”
