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Aquanaut travels in streamlined submarine mode to a subsea work site.More Than Meets the Eye Aquanaut is unique among unmanned underwater vehicles because it can transform itself from a nimble submarine designed for long-distance cruising into a half-humanoid robot capable of carrying out complex manipulation tasks. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s 10 times harder or 50 times harder for robots working underwater than it is in space.” Underwater, things are extraordinarily dynamic. “I’ll grant you that getting into space is harder than getting underwater,” he says. HMI cofounder and chief technology officer Nic Radford spent 14 years working on advanced robotics projects at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in Houston. Extreme environments are what they’re best at. For HMI, however, that’s not a problem: Of its 75 employees, over two dozen used to work for NASA. They rely on robotic technologies that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades, largely because of the challenge of working in such an extreme environment. The companies that own and operate this infrastructure spend vast sums of money to inspect and maintain it. Aquanaut has been designed primarily for servicing subsea oil and gas installations. The HMI engineers, who often joke that building a Transformer has been one of their long-term career objectives, are convinced that it can be done. HMI tests Aquanaut at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.

It’s a bold approach that no one has attempted before. HMI wants to combine both of these modes into a single robot. Conventional UUVs typically fit into two categories: torpedo-like free-swimming submersibles, which are used for long-distance survey missions, and boxy remotely operated machines, which are tethered to support vessels and used for underwater manipulation.

(HMI), hope will completely change subsea robotics. The sleek submarine is now a half-humanoid robot, ready to get to work.Īquanaut represents a radical new design that its creators, at a startup called Houston Mechatronics Inc.

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A wedge-shaped head packed full of sensors rotates into place, and in a matter of seconds, the transformation is complete.

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Then, in what could be a scene from the movie Transformers, the top part of the robot’s hull rises up from the base, exposing two massive arms that unfold from either side. At first, it doesn’t seem all that different from other unmanned underwater vehicles, or UUVs, equipped with sensors for gathering data and thrusters for propulsion. I’m here for a peek at Aquanaut, the bright orange robot that we’re sharing the pool with.Īquanaut glides smoothly through the water like a miniature submarine. And though it’s a thrill to watch the space-suited figures at work, I didn’t come to see them. I’m in Houston, scuba diving in a massive swimming pool that NASA uses to train astronauts for zero-gravity environments.

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I’m drifting weightlessly, in a silence broken only by my own breathing and the occasional update from Mission Control in my headset. Just a short distance away from me, two astronauts are practicing for a spacewalk. Into the Blue: The robot Aquanaut floats underwater during a test at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.