Autonomous Orpheus Underwater Drone Explore the Ocean Background

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The Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that on May 14, one of its exploration vessels called Okeanos Explorer left Port Canaveral in Florida for a two-week expedition. The ship aboard an autonomous submarine vehicle called Orpheus which is a technological demonstration.

The autonomous underwater exploration vessel is a new class of submersible robots designed to highlight the system to help identify and explore scientific characteristics on the seabed. Orpheus was developed by engineers at the NASA propulsion laboratory and is an evolution of a vision-based navigation system used on Mars. The mission leads its explorations of the East Coast of the United States in the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA generally says large, and looking for place search location for power consumption like Sonar would be needed to navigate in dark waters near the seabed. However, Orpheus uses a low power camera system and lights with advanced software that makes it a lighter order of magnitude than most deep submersibles.

Orpheus is smaller than a mountain bike and weighs about 550 pounds. Its design is supposed to be agile and easy to use while being robust with the ability to explore at depths that most vehicles can not survive. Orpheus can work almost anywhere in the ocean, including the most extreme depths.

The project team hopes that ultimately, a swarm of underwater robots working in a team will build 3D maps of large unexplored ocean areas in the Hadrea area covering deeper 20,000 feet. Before the robot can be cleared to explore such depths, it must be meticulously tested in shallow waters. The team estimates that, in the future, Orpheus will put some of the most extreme ocean environments within reach of explorers ranging from deep ocean trenches to hydrothermal ventilation.