Tiburon replacement
Project Manager: Dale Graves
Lead Engineer: Mike Risi
The convergence of a number of factors have made it no longer cost effective to continue to maintain Tiburon as MBARI’s main remotely operated vehicle (ROV). The vehicle is underpowered for observatory work, likely to be its major occupation during the coming years, and has insufficient payload for the new generation of instruments to be deployed on ocean observatories. Too many of its systems are no longer supported by manufacturers and spares are impossible to find. Upgrade paths are very expensive or completely impractical. Fortunately, commercial options exist for replacing Tiburon that are affordable and lead to a vehicle with increased power and payload, improved maintainability, and decreased internal engineering support requirements.