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| The Orpheus robot, developed jointly by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and JPL, autonomously explores the deep ocean. It employs vision-based navigation akin to the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s flight navigation. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech |
Terrain-relative navigation, instrumental in guiding Perseverance's landing and enabling Ingenuity's autonomous flight on Mars, is now poised for testing in another frontier of exploration.
On May 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer sets sail from Port Canaveral in Florida on a two-week expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration. The highlight of this voyage is the demonstration of an autonomous underwater vehicle named Orpheus. This innovative submersible robot, developed to explore the ocean depths, will showcase its ability to navigate and identify scientific features on the seafloor.
Orpheus utilizes terrain-relative navigation, a technology that played a crucial role in guiding NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover to a precise landing on the Red Planet in February. This system allowed Perseverance to map the Martian landscape, identify potential hazards, and select a safe landing site without human intervention. Similarly, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter employs a vision-based navigation system to track surface features during flight, aiding its movements across the Martian terrain.
Now, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California are testing an evolution of this vision-based navigation system closer to home, off the U.S. East Coast in the Atlantic Ocean. Orpheus is equipped with a lightweight system of cameras and lights, along with advanced software, eliminating the need for large, high-power location-finding equipment like sonar. Weighing approximately 550 pounds (250 kilograms) and smaller than a quad bike, Orpheus is designed to be agile, user-friendly, and durable, enabling exploration of depths unreachable by most vehicles in the ocean.
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The Orpheus technology demonstration will take place aboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer. Departing from Port Canaveral in Florida on May 14, the two-week expedition will explore the waters off the U.S. East Coast.
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Designed by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in collaboration with JPL, Orpheus can work untethered almost anywhere in the ocean, including the most extreme depths. Ultimately, the project team hopes to see a swarm of these underwater robots work as a team to build 3D maps of the vast regions of unexplored ocean floor in the hadal zone — regions deeper than 20,000 feet (6,000 meters). But before the robot can explore these depths, it must first be put through its paces in shallower waters.
Diving Into the Future
Russell Smith, a robotics mechanical engineer at JPL, commented, “This tech demo will gather data to showcase the feasibility of terrain-relative navigation in the ocean and demonstrate the coordinated operation of multiple robots in challenging environments. These tests will pave the way for future dives into the hadal zone, enabling intelligent exploration of areas with high biological activity.”
Orpheus, seen here during a prior expedition, can delve into the ocean’s deepest reaches, crafting 3D seafloor maps. Its compact size, as shown, simplifies transportation and operation. |
Orpheus utilizes visual-inertial odometry (xVIO), an advanced version of vision-based navigation. This system employs high-resolution cameras, pattern-matching software, and precise orientation and motion sensors to identify features like rocks, shells, and coral on the seafloor. These features serve as waypoints, allowing Orpheus to construct 3D maps for navigation. Moreover, xVIO stores these maps in memory, facilitating future exploration in the same area and enabling the sharing and cross-referencing of maps when working with other robots.
Andy Klesh, a systems engineer at JPL, highlights the benefits of small, simplified tools like Orpheus for ocean scientists, which also serve as analog systems for autonomous space exploration. Collaboration between NASA, WHOI, and NOAA could extend these technologies to explore oceans on other planets, such as Europa, which possesses a subsurface ocean.
Tim Shank, a biologist leading WHOI’s Hadal Exploration program, emphasizes the significance of exploring Earth’s hadal depths, which share similar pressures to the bottom of Europa’s subsurface ocean. Understanding Earth’s oceans better is crucial before exploring ocean worlds like Europa to answer questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.