It’s about the size of a Zamboni and can be lowered 6,000 metres into the depths, light up the ocean floor, take high- resolution photos and, with robotic arms and pincer grips, pick up heavy objects and turn the smallest bolt.
One of the world’s most advanced deep-ocean remotely operated vehicles will get its sea trials over the next week off the coast of Vancouver Island, and scientists from the University of Victoria-based Ocean Networks Canada will be along for the ride and some important work.
North Vancouver-based Canpac Marine Services Inc., a privately held company, contracted with several B.C.-based marine firms to build the “droid of the deep.”
It headed out Friday night aboard Canpac Valour, a 50-metre supply ship, for an eight-day mission to test the ROV and perform maintenance on some of the cables and instruments that make up Ocean Network Canada’s 800- kilometre NEPTUNE Observatory.
“This was specifically built for deep-water science projects,” Canpac president Ryan Anderson said aboard the ship at Patricia Bay on Friday. “This ROV can work at 600 times the pressure we currently feel on the surface. That’s a crushing depth, so it’s an ultra deep ROV and it can work in about 85% of the depths of the ocean across the world.”
Anderson said the ROV took about two and a half years from design to completion, including a year to manufacture. Engineering firms, naval architects, design engineers and manufacturers from across B.C. took part. The final cost was about $8 million, he said.
“After two years and to be able to see it hit the water, it’s a good feeling,” said Anderson.
The ROV has two beams of scanning sonar, 11 high-resolution cameras — including cinematography-level cameras — and lighting systems that throw 300,000 lumens into pitch-black depths.
It has a pair of robotic manipulator arms with “acute dexterity,” advanced telemetry software systems that control the ROV from the surface and a precise navigation system all manipulated through a command room on the deck of the ship.
Anderson said there are only two other similar ROVs operating in the world that can go to 6,000 metres, one in Australia and another based in Europe, though there are others capable of 2,000- and 3,000-metre depths.
Canpac Marine Services has been operating since 1980 and is involved in building and operating ROVs, commercial diving and offshore services such as subsea cable installations. It has contracts with B.C. Hydro and telecommunication companies, and works on projects with the Canadian Coast Guard, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and universities for research.
“B.C. is a centre for deep-water technology and we drew on a lot of that expertise to build this,” said Anderson.
Josh Tetarenko, Canpac’s’s director of ROV operations, said the camera and lighting systems “are second to none” in the industry.
The ROV will cast a very bright light in the depths with its 300,000 lumens system. For perspective, a 100-watt incandescent light bulb produces about 1,600 lumens. Each of the lights are movable as the ROV is operating subsea, a feature most ROVs don’t have, Tetarenko said.
“It’s very helpful for scientific purposes searching the seafloor for certain things. The lights also emit a soft red light for filming biolumenesence that is used in biology research.”
The two robotic arms are “spatially correspondent,” said Tetarenko. “This means we have a small version of these manipulators in the control room. When we move that small miniature version, that arm will move exactly as we move. To have two of these on an ROV is very rare and they are very useful for complicated tasks under water.”
Tetarenko did a quick demonstration on the deck, using one arm to pick up a hard hat and drop it into a plastic milk crate.
The ROV has extended “porches” around its bottom that extend outward so the arm can place objects on the platforms underwater to be brought back to the surface with the ROV. Those porches can transport equipment up to 3,000 kilograms down to the ocean floor or bring objects up.
“That helps our clients put their scientific instruments exactly where they want them and in an orientation they want in the deep sea, which is not an easy feat to do engineering wise,” said Tetarenko.
Meghan Paulson, executive director of observatory operations at Ocean Networks Canada, said the expedition to the NEPTUNE Observatory is primarily to “sea-trial the ROV … the bonus is we’re also going to be able to get some of our maintenance done as well.”
NEPTUNE — an acronym for North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments — is a power-cabled, 800-kilometre loop network of tools and more than 400 sensors on the sea floor off Vancouver Island that sends live data of ocean conditions to the public and hundreds of scientists in real time over the internet.
The time-series data allow scientists to study long-term changes in the ocean. Instruments along the undersea observatory operate at depths ranging from 17 metres to 2,660 metres.
The short expedition will work at three NEPTUNE sites, Clayoquot, Barkley and Folger Deep — the closest points to the Island.
Though the NEPTUNE loop centres on the Juan de Fuca plate — an active seismology site — the expedition won’t be going out that far to check on equipment.
“There’s always work to be done on NEPTUNE … there’s instruments to swap out and information to gather at the sites,” said Paulson. “We will be mounting one of our connectivity and depth instruments onto the remotely operated vehicle and we will be gathering that information as well as the video transects as we go up and down, which is useful information for some of our scientists.”
There will also be some “heavy lifts,” she said. That will include changing a junction box in the NEPTUNE loop.
“This is one of the main hubs of power and communication that we use undersea. This is complicated. There’s a lot of connections that need to be made for different instruments and it’s a really heavy piece of equipment that we have to take down with the ROV and then bring the old one up.”
The team will also do work closer to shore in 100 metres of water.
“When we dive deep the challenges are pressure related, but the visibility is quite good,” said Paulson. “When we dive shallow the visibility tends to be terrible because there’s a lot more current and a lot more sediment being stirred up. So how does the vehicle act in those types of conditions? That’s what we want to see.”
The expedition will be broadcast live on oceannetworks.ca
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