The way to space leads through the depths of the sea

OceanOneK is only 1.5 meters long, but could change science forever: from the front, it looks like a human diver with arms, hands and a moving head. The back of the robot is reminiscent of a mini-submarine, the back is equipped with computers and eight propulsion nozzles. It is the second generation of the diving robot – and it has already been successfully tested on several dives in the Mediterranean.

Great haptic remote control
According to the American broadcaster CNN, the great feature of OceanOneK is how the operating team interacts with the robot: the helmsman operates it via a haptic interface that communicates the water resistance and the contours of the object being lifted. The operator “feels” in real time what the robot is touching hundreds of meters below.

The makers of the robot around Stanford scientist Oussama Khatib want to penetrate as deep as 1000 meters with OceanOneK and have been testing the robot in recent months on ever deeper dives in the Mediterranean Sea. OceanOneK visited two aircraft wrecks, the wrecked submarine Le Protée and most recently in July, as an endurance test, the Le Francesco Crispi at a depth of about 500 meters.

Khatib is excited: “You get closer and closer to this amazing structure, then you touch it and something incredible happens: you can really feel it. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life. I can claim that I touched the Crispi at a depth of 500 meters. I really touched and felt them.’ OceanOneK brought antique vases from the wreck of the Crispi to the surface.

Research where people would not survive
Khatib and his team came up with the idea for the robot in 2014 because they were looking for a way to study coral reefs in the Red Sea at depths that divers could not reach due to the high pressure. So they wanted to build an underwater vehicle that would be as close as possible to a human diver, but at the same time be equipped with modern robotics, artificial intelligence and haptic feedback.

The road to OceanOneK was not easy, says Khatib. The biggest difficulty during construction was to shield the robot from the enormous water pressure at a depth of one kilometer. Here, among other things, a special foam with glass microspheres was used, which should increase the buoyancy and withstand the pressure one hundred times higher than on the surface of the water. Improvements to the arms and other components have also been made. The design has proven itself: the deepest dive to date was more than 850 meters deep.

From the seabed to space
If Khatib has its way, the depths of the oceans are just an intermediate step for the technologies built into OceanOneK. “We traveled all the way to France for our expedition, where, surrounded by a larger team from different backgrounds, we realized that this robot we were working on at Stanford was part of something bigger,” says Khatib. Then he understood how important his technology can be to science as a whole: haptic remotes and avatar robots that work where humans can’t survive can’t just be used in the deep sea.

Khatib tells CNN that the European space agency ESA has expressed interest in his robot. She was able to test haptic controls on the International Space Station. “You could interact with the robot in the depths of the sea. And that would be great, because it would simulate the task of doing this on another planet or a strange moon.”