OpenROV Explores Aquarius

You know it shouldn't take a research grant to do exploration, it should take curiosity,
and that's what we are all about.
So today we went on the boat to the Aquarius underwater lab, and we deployed Open ROV.
The open ROV is this open source, do it yourself, telerobotic submarine. It's a little robot
that has a camera on it and the camera sends video images up to the surface, live, and
you can control where the ROV drives, to see what it sees. Its completely open source and
open hardware, so that what we've developed is just the beginning, other people can find
ways to contribute to it.
We get design ideas, we get adventure ideas, we get exploration tips, and the community
is giving us so much feedback on, not only the design but what they want, you know what
kind of tool would be useful for them when they are exploring.
It's a tool that allows people who are just interested, without necessarily having a specific
question to ask, to just go look around. The kind of things in our history that have been
explored or discovered, just by chance, are amazing. So by giving a tool to the average,
everyday person to go explore and find out cool stuff, I think that's really important.
If we can crowd source exploration, there is a lot of good that comes from that, and
right now no one can just go out and pilot an ROV without having a lot of money.
This is a great extreme environment, the open ROV is a very capable technology, and what
we were trying to test out was just a functional demonstration of the OpenROV's capabilities.
It had never been in the open ocean before, we didn't know if it would work in waves,
we didn't know if it would work in currents, and we were able to get, on the first dive,
everything we were looking for.
Being at Aquarius was just awesome. This is a lab that is like something I would have
dreamed up when I was a little kid. I mean, it's that huge underwater habitat, with scuba
diver going around, you know working on stuff. The water was crystal clear, people were saying
it's as clear as it's ever been there and there were all sorts of fish like in aquariums.
The allure of the ocean is that it's right there. Not just the ocean, but the lakes,
and ponds, and rivers. The ocean is three dimensional, and that means that more than
95% of where life can exist on this planet has never been explored. So, what giant squid,
or crazy looking fish, or worms exist out there that we have never seen? And what processes
have we never seen? All that is untouched and unexplored. So that to me is really fascinating,
and I don't think we'll ever finish exploring the ocean.