OpenROV enables you to experience the underwater world in a completely new way. Whether it's for work or recreation, their easy-to-use platform helps you to do and see more.
Q: In a nutshell, what is openROV?
Eric Stackpole, Co-Founder: openROV is a product which allows people to explore parts of the world no one has ever seen before. We call these remotely operated vehicles ROVs. The idea behind all of this is that we realized that a lot of the low cost tools available to the public now, like the Pi, and internal electronics that you can be very sophisticated with and have a lot of capability and there are a lot of production tools like 3D printers and laser printers, so we wanted to start a community that would allow everyday people to have access to exploration tools that they’ve never had before by means of this new technology. So openROV builds products like that, but it’s also a community.
Q: What about Trident, how did it come about?
E: We’ve been building kits that people can assemble over the course of a few weeks, for the last 5 years or so, and we’re actually the largest volume builder of ROVs in the world. These kits are very successful, but we realized that it was still a huge barrier to entry to have to build these on your own. So Trident is an answer to that, and it’s a culmination of everything we’ve learned. It’s a sleek vehicle briefcase sized vehicle that’s ready to go out of the box, and you can go down to a hundred meter depth, which is four to five times deeper than most scuba divers will ever go, and it can work in rough conditions and it can go very fast, two meters per second, same speed as Michael Phelps at the Olympics. That allows you to penetrate currents so you can use it in the open ocean. It’s an exploration tool that’s portable, durable, and usable by everyone.
Q: What kind of consumer would you say the Trident is aimed at?
E: We’ve really tried to make Trident something that is available broadly to consumers, because normally these types of vehicles are an order of magnitude higher cost than Trident. There are a lot of people who are interested in scuba diving or recreational boating or fishing who seem to be interested in having a tool to look around underwater, but we’ve also sold a lot to people who work at institutions or who are doing semiprofessional study, for example they’re trying to trace Christopher Columbus’s path through the US. There are a lot of professional and amateur explorers. The most common thread is that we’re selling to people who are serious about exploring the world, rather than just taking the word of someone they read about in a magazine.
Q: Can you talk about some of the main challenges you faced when developing Trident?
E: One of the hardest things about what we’re doing is trying to make a consumer product that can be mass produced but is still capable of doing extraordinary things. For instance, when we’re at max depth of 100 meters the vehicle needs to be able to withstand tremendous pressure, something like 12000 pounds of force with the surface area our unit has, pushing the two injection molded parts that make up the vehicle, so we had to do a lot of really careful engineering to make it able to withstand that pressure. Additionally we’re trying to make this device smart, it has to be able to post to a live video server, give people high quality low latency video, and do all of it reliably. So there was a lot of intense mechanical engineering to make it so durable and also software engineering, because a lot of this is groundbreaking, there weren’t existing libraries that we could use right off the bat. There were a lot of things we had to figure out to do for the first time.
Q: Can you talk about the technologies involved in Trident, how you selected it and implemented it?
E: It starts with not just the vehicle but the tools used to develop the vehicle. We did an extensive amount of computer aided design to make sure the vehicle would work well. We also used a lot of graphic prototyping tools like 3D printers to make early prototypes. We found that you have to experiment with these things to get them right, it’s hard to just know that it’ll work. A lot of the design and prototyping tools were extremely valuable to us. Inside the vehicle is some pretty sophisticated tech too, I think. The main computer is a Pi, on board there’s a lot of image processing that happens, and our motor controllers are something we’re pretty proud of. They use an advanced field oriented controller and that allows us to move our motors much more efficiently, quietly, and with more control. Most electric speed controllers (ESPs) use something more basic, and that might work for quadcopters or RC planes where you’re usually at full throttle or a coarse speed, but for the ROV you have to have specific control of the RPM, and that’ll make a big difference in the performance of our vehicle, and that took several months to get right.
Q: How did element14 get involved in the project?
E: element14 has helped us for some time. Not only do they provide us with the Beaglebone Black computers we used in our kits, they also supply us with a modified version of the Pi which is the main computer in the unit. We needed to fit everything in a very small package, so we need a version of the Pi that didn’t have the headers, USB ports, Ethernet jacks, and some other larger components, so they worked with us to make a stripped down version that’s very thin and can be mounted directly onto the motherboard of our vehicle.
Q: What has it meant to have element14 on board?
E: We really like having someone who can work with us for our specific needs. We were able to ask the team what was possible, what could work for our business, rather than just telling us what was available and those are the only options.
Q: Can you give an example of projects where Trident has been used?
E: So we haven’t quite shipped yet, but we did give a unit to a renowned photographer, Eric Cheng, who took it to the west coast of Australia and was able to fly Trident around in the ocean there, and even got some footage of killer whales. We’ve also done our own deployments, we fly mostly locally in Lake Tahoe and Monterrey Bay, and there have been lots of cool things we found. We frolicked around with a harbor seal that came up to check out the ROV. We also used Trident to look for a shipwreck in Lake Tahoe called the SS Tahoe, a 160 foot long steam ship that was built in the 1800s, hardly had been seen since. Using our 2 series ROV, built from a kit, we were able to get into the shipwreck and land on the bathroom sink in 400 feet of water, and that was all video streamed from one of the Pis on board the Unit 2.
Q: Do you see yourself as having competitors, and what sets Trident apart?
E: Certainly the whole idea of underwater drones is heating up, and we’re seeing other products with the same concept, targeting the consumer market and trying to keep the costs down. At the end of the day at openROV we want to democratize exploration, and it’s inevitable that others will try similar ideas, but we want to innovate better and faster. I think the underwater drone movement is very powerful because it’s allowing people to see things that they never have before, whereas with the aerial drone trend you get to see a new vantage point for things you already knew were there. We’re not just making a product that allows more things to be seen, we’re changing who it is who gets to see those new things, as well.
Q: What’s coming up next for openROV?
E: Right now our primary focus is Trident, which is coming out soon, but we also want to work on expanding and democratizing exploration. We want to provide accessory add-ons to Trident that will give the vehicle, so you can add gripper arms, water samplers, an external light, things like that. We’re also going to do a lot of work on our software, to give our unit more capability to interpret what it sees, to detect things more easily, and allow more people to use the vehicle.
Q: Aside from your own products, what other new tech and developments excite you?
E: We’re hoping that this company won’t just offer a product, we want to create a community surrounding what you can do with them, developing new things for the vehicles as well. We always encourage people who are interested in our products to go on our forums at openrov.com and start talking about the ideas they have for ways to build Trident add-ons, to make it better and more capable. We love the idea of having a community behind what we’re doing.
Prior to Trident, I’ve always loved tele-robotics, the idea of controlling a device in a place where you can’t physically be yourself. Even before I was working on ROVs I was building telerobotics, I had these two robots during undergrad called ESTHER and TRAVIS. They each had a camera on the top about the height of a person, and I could drive them around from my dorm room around the engineering building, the idea being they could go to class for me and I wouldn’t even have to get out of bed. They worked fairly well, but mostly other students would end up locking them in the bathroom to try to embarrass me.
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