Nautilus and Mantaris: The design and fabrication of Santa Clara University’s
second and third ROV

Chad Bulich, and others
Santa Clara University

Wednesday, April 26, 2000
3:00 p.m.—Pacific Forum

In the spring of 1999, the Santa Clara Remote Extreme Environment Mechanisms (SCREEM) lab formed its second underwater ROV design team as part of its Extreme Environment Telepresence Enchanced ROV (ExETER) program. With funding from The West Coast and Polar Regions Undersea Research Center, the team had the goal of designing, manufacturing, and delivering a versatile and scientifically capable ROV after one complete school year. Using the experience gained in the previous year from the first ROV design group, team Triton, a design plan had to be quickly created and implemented in order to successfully deliver the ROV by the end of the school year.

The ExETER2 team decided to first start out by designing a test ROV in order to gain knowledge and experience toward ROV design and fabrication. Named Nautilus, the main goal of Santa Clara University’s (SCU) second ROV was to focus on the design and fabrication of the syntactic foam flotation. Completed in late March, the knowledge gained from this vehicle was then carried into the design of Mantaris, SCU’s third ROV. Mantaris was designed at approximately 400 pounds with the capability of carrying a wide variety of scientific payloads. SCU has been working closely with Deep Ocean Engineering and MBARI throughout the process, and students continue to work hard to complete the fabrication of ROV Mantaris.

In this seminar, the design philosophy of the lab and the subsequent design and capabilities of both Nautilus and Mantaris will be discussed.

Next:  Automatic vision-based local positioning, navigation, and seafloor mapping for unmanned submersible vehicles

 Last updated: December 19, 2000