Aquanaut

An orange half humanoid submarine robot with gripper hands is underwater in a space with a scuba diver.
Aquanaut during a test at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Photo: Ken Kiefer

Aquanaut is an unmanned underwater vehicle that can transform itself from a nimble submarine designed for long-distance cruising into a half-humanoid robot capable of carrying out complex manipulation tasks. It can inspect subsea oil and gas infrastructure, operate valves, and use tools.

Creator

Nauticus Robotics

Year
2019
Country
United States 🇺🇸
Categories
Features
A series of images show a large orange robot transform between a submarine and a humanoid robot with gripper hands.
Interactive
See how Aquanaut transforms itself. Images: Houston Mechatronics

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Did you know?

Houston Mechatronics tested Aquanaut in a massive indoor pool that NASA uses to train astronauts for zero-gravity environments.

An orange half humanoid submarine robot with gripper hands shines a light underwater.
The robot has two powerful 8-degrees-of-freedom arms. Photo: Ken Kiefer
An engineer looks a four computer screens showing images and data from a submarine robot.
Operators supervise the robot without having to directly control it. Photo: Ken Kiefer
How Aquanaut works. Video: IEEE Spectrum

History

Nauticus Robotics (formerly Houston Mechatronics) was started by former NASA roboticists who worked on advanced technologies used in complex space missions. Founders Matt Ondler, Reg Berka, and Nic Radford want to bring their robotics expertise to industries that include energy, offshore oil and gas, defense, and seabed mining. They have raised more than US $23 million in venture capital since starting Nauticus in 2014. The company, based in Houston, Texas, is developing an all-electric underwater transforming vehicle called Aquanaut. It combines the capabilities of both an underwater autonomous vehicle, or AUV, and a remotely operated underwater vehicle, or ROV. When in AUV mode, it can travel long distances of up to 200 km (108 nautical miles) in one mission while mapping its surroundings and performing structure inspections. In ROV mode, the robot can turn valves, use subsea tools, and perform other manipulation tasks.

An orange half humanoid submarine robot with gripper hands shines a light underwater.
Humans can't dive to deepwater oil rigs, but Aquanaut can. Photo: Ken Kiefer
An orange half humanoid in water with it's arms thrust out and it's reflection creating a mirror image.
Aquanaut's transformation takes only 30 seconds. Photo: Ken Kiefer

Specs

Overview

All-electric vehicle, high level of autonomy. Operates completely untethered and does not require support ships as with traditional ROVs. The current version can travel more than 200 kilometers in submarine mode and has a maximum operational depth of 300 meters.

Status

Ongoing

Year

2019

Website
Width
152 cm
Height
97 cm (closed), 160 cm (open)
Length
350 cm
Weight
1050 kg
Speed
13 km/h (7 knots)
Sensors

Manipulators with joint absolute position and force and torque sensing at the end-effector. Vehicle body contains an inertial navigation system, Doppler Velocity Logs (DVLs), ultra-short baseline, machine vision cameras, forward-looking sonar, scanning sonars, GPS, and custom 3D structured light.

Actuators

Electric

Degrees of Freedom (DoF)
26 (Arm: 7 DoF x 2; Arm end-effector: 1 DoF x 2; Propulsion: 7 DoF; Head: 2 DoF; Transformation Mechanism: 1 DoF)
Materials

Syntactic foam with composite overlay

Compute

Custom control and computing package

Software

Custom software built around ROS framework

Power

Rechargeable lithium-ion