Homebuilt ROVs Forum

My mechanical engineering Capstone Design team is building a self-contained ROV exhibit for use by the subsea industry. The biggest part of this exhibit will be an ROV and an accompanying tank to perform simulated ROV operations. We intend to build an improved version of the Seafox.

Our biggest concern during our design phase is the stability of the ROV platform for manipulation operations. How easy is it to keep the ROV in one place while moving the arm and handling different objects?

It is not particularly easy, due to the small size.

Welcome to the forum; I wish you luck in your project

If you head over to Oceaneering in Morgan City they may have some tips/old equipment they may be willing to part with.

If you need a contact name, feel free to PM me.

SEATIGER wrote: Our biggest concern during our design phase is the stability of the ROV platform for manipulation operations. How easy is it to keep the ROV in one place while moving the arm and handling different objects?

If you can spare the power, one way to do it is with suction cups at the end of ancillary arms. On a clean up job, or metal integrity test job, you "embrace" the rig's leg with the suction cups and then probe/clean/puncture (!) away, with no drifting. But like I said, there is a power cost (running the "vacuum" pump(s)).

On full size ROV's we had one guy piloting and one operating manips, so the pilot could compensate for any movement caused by the manips. not nessesary for a simple grabber but worth it if you have two big multifunction manips.

On rc helicopters they use a gyro to stabilize the tail. They work really well and are as cheap or as fancy as you want. You could rig a 3 axis gyro to your thrusters and they should help stabilize your craft when your grabbing somthing or not. They are designed to ignore control inputs but counteract outside changes in orientation.