rs. MIT Sea Grant's Judy Pederson has been tracking the Didemnum invasion for several years, hoping to prevent it from smothering important native species; Odyssey IV will be her eyes on the seafloor.
And the new craft's unique capabilities go beyond just looking at objects. "Like a giant helicopter, this can pick up cargo underwater," Chryssostomidis says. "Now, we can visit an oil well, pick up a sample and bring it back to shore." With the addition of a mechanical arm, the vessel will be able to do manipulations such as twisting a valve open or closed.
Not only can the craft hover, it can move quickly, up to two meters per second going straight ahead. Both its speed and its ability to stop in place are achieved through the combined action of fins and thrusters on each side, and at the bow and stern of the two-meter-long craft.
The new vehicle may be able to stop in place, but Chryssostomidis and his colleague Franz Hover, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and their team, research engineers Jim Morash, Victor Polidoro, Justin Eskesen and graduate student Dylan Owens, certainly are not. With the initial sea trials of Odyssey IV just completed, they are focused squarely on moving ahead to their goals. They need to develop vastly improved power-storage and communications capabilities, to enable these vehicles to stay underwater longer, cover more terrain, and send back more data to scientists on shore. Ultimately, Chryssostomidis says, he hopes his team will produce an AUV that can spend a full year underwater, collecting data and transmitting it to its home base, without any need to surface at all.
"Once we prove the hovering capability foolproof, as we think it is now, the next challenge for me to worry about is the issue of recharging, so that I can be free of the surface vessel," he says. He also hopes to develop better manipulator arms that will be able to interact more flexibly with the undersea environment, to pick up objects or carry out repairs.
But for now, Chryssostomidis is reveling in the fact that Odyssey IV, after years of development, has passed its initial tests in the ocean with flying colors. No matter how good the design, that's not something you can take for granted, he explains. "The sea is very unforgiving. If there's anything that can go wrong, the sea will find it."