Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Is there any help with design or cost of an underwater robot maybe what it could be used for?

ralyks wrote:Is there any help with design or cost of an underwater robot maybe what it could be used for?

There are lots of underwater robots! They are used for many different things and can be very complicated. Many of them can be expensive because it is diffuclt to design things to work under water. Even simple land based robots can be complicated and expensive (see http://www.seattlerobotics.org/guide/ for some land robot information)

A cool page is at:
http://www.neurotechnology.neu.edu/

This is written in very technical language- but they have movies of the robots at the bottom! (This one is cool:
http://www.neurotechnology.neu.edu/newC ... lator.html )

They are trying to make robots that move just as well as an actual animal- they are trying to design a robot that moves like a lobster. Once they can do that they would use the robot for "remote sensing".

I googled for "underwater robots" and almost all the links on the first page were from different research groups that build such robots. Why don't you look at some of these pages and see if you can find a particular question or problem that you find interesting? Then maybe you can get more specific help from people here.

Louise

Hi Skylar,

If you want to buy an already made water-ready robot you can do so at:
http://www.hobbyengineering.com/SectionRA.html
Go to the Amphibious Solar Vehicle Robot Kit.
It costs $40.00
This may not be underwater-ready though.

Now for your questions on what can an underwater robot do ? Well the answer is up to the makers of the robot. Robots are defined as electro-mechanical autonomous devices pre-programmed to do specific tasks. So someone with the skill in building a robot can program the robot to do anything. So perhaps for underwater video taking, or to collect sea floor samples of only metallic object, etc2.

Here is another link which explains how to go about building your own underwater robot.
http://www.acroname.com/robotics/info/a ... uabot.html
If you have the expertise then you can build an underwater robot to do whatever you want it to depending on the level of complexity of the robot.

Hopes this helps somewhat ! Good luck.

That is cool!