Last spring, Schwartz’s colleague Rob Morris tested the Seaeye on its first successful anchor recovery while performing routine mooring operations with OOI, 60 miles due south of Cape Cod. Schwartz, along with Engineer Jeff Pietro, managed to assemble the vehicle’s portable mission control lab in less than an hour aboard R/V Neil Armstrong. “To rent this vehicle would take away the possibility of pushing divers to certain depths – the possibilities of risk to human life,” added Schwartz, who has been diving to monitor and retrieve instruments at the Martha’s Vineyard Coastal Observatory.Īs its name suggests, the Seaeye provides a live view of the mission streamed from more than three cameras that send video through an umbilical cord patching directly to the pilot’s topside monitors. For Schwartz, it’s also a viable alternative to find and survey items beyond diver depth (more than 250 feet) without having to do the cumbersome work of lugging, hoisting, and maneuvering larger models. That compactness may save at-sea crew the time and money necessary to set aside deck space, along with the number of personnel needed to deploy and recover the vehicle. It is an eighth the size of Jason, a founding member of WHOI's ROV team, and more than eleven times lighter than the next smallest option, the Kraken2, which has traditionally been loaned to WHOI by the University of Connecticut for recovery operations. At just 200 lbs, the Seaeye is one of the nimblest ROVs at WHOI, said Schwartz. The vehicle itself resembles a mid-size backup generator in scale. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds the OOI program, green-lighted the purchase in early 2018. ![]() “After World War II there were a lot of aerospace engineers, but not a lot to do, so they built cars.”Īfter General Motors sold the company in 2010, Saab acquired a thruster manufacturer called Seaeye, with whom it would work to repurpose a 30-year old design, now known as the Falcon. “Saab was originally a manufacturer of aircraft and other at-sea equipment, including remotely operated vehicles and torpedoes,” said Roper. But according to representative Chris Roper, products like the ROV are really more on brand for the company than one might think. The vehicle was created by Saab, a Swedish company best known for its car manufacturing. “Having that ROV on-hand allows us to maintain that objective.” ![]() “One of the objectives of OOI is that we like to recover everything we put in the water,” said Schwartz. WHOI Engineer Jared Schwartz, who piloted the vehicle in search of an unrecovered mooring anchor, said the success of the mission validated the continued use of the vehicle as part of a more permanent in situ monitoring service for OOI. 2, while performing routine mooring operations, members of the Ocean Observatories Initiative saw an opportunity to exercise one of WHOI’s newest ROV’s, the Seaeye Falcon. After another successful reconnaissance dive this month, one of the smallest remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) at WHOI may be a turnkey monitoring and recovery service for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) and its scientific moorings.
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