Why Underwater Drones Are Becoming So Popular?
Underwater robots are one of the important tools for different explorations and are used mainly to understand more about marine science and exploration. For the last 30 to 40 years lots of work was done and the modern version of these underwater drones has several advanced features.
These underwater drones are manufactured by Chasing-Innovation Technology that was established in 2016 and is having it headquarter in Shenzhen China. Its other offices are also available in Beijing, Chengdu, Qingdao, and Kunming in China however, it is located in the USA.
These drones are used in many different ways and in this article, we will discuss 10 different applications.
- Shipwreck search
The most celebrated team was used by a research ship of the USA to discover the Titanic shipwreck in 1985 and after completing a top-secret mission for inspecting the remains of a long-lost nuclear submarine of the US Navy.
- Diving buddy
Due to miniaturization, there is no support needed to operate an ROV. Now the saltwater’s electrical conductivity makes radio communication quite difficult underwater, hence ROVs are directly connected to an operator through umbilical cables for carrying out underwater inspections.
- Yellow submarine used oil and gas exploration
These fully autonomous underwater drones are also deployed by the oil industry to explore oil and gas on the sea. Many drone submarines have been used for inspecting offshore rigs and various underwater pipelines, which costs about a billion dollars in a year.
- Wave gliders
These drones use solar power and wave motion to travel about thousands of miles at the sea without fuel, with various applications in environmental monitoring, offshore oil-and-gas operations, defense, and maritime surveillance.
- Ocean gliders
Underwater gliders, can convert small buoyancy changes into forwarding motion. They are extensively used for scientific research at the sea, e.g. remote water sampling, acoustical surveillance, or environmental monitoring on thousands of miles of the ocean.
- Underwater mapping
Underwater drones were already used for mapping underwater sites of importance. The Sirius AUV was used in 2015, to map this Antikythera Mechanism that was found, along with many other treasures. 7. Fly and dive The ‘Naviator’ drone has been developed and used for inspecting bridges both below and above the water, for various search and rescue activities, and also the evaluation of certain seaborne environmental incidents, such as oil spills or any algae blooms.
- Underwater warriors
The US Navy has created its first underwater drone unit, which is eventually used in almost “every spectrum” of the naval operations, right from surveillance and mine hunting to various humanitarian assistance as well as scientific research.
- Experimental naval drone
The Naval Undersea Warfare Center of the USA also has developed an unmanned under the water vehicle as a kind of modular test-bed for autonomous under the water drone technologies. This is about 30 feet long and can carry a payload of almost 5 tons.
- Science swarm
Besides the world’s navies, scientists and researchers in Austria have developed such drones to perform different kinds of research activities and also to accomplish many different tasks under water.