Kraken will take its own decisions.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: A team of students at IIT Kharagpur have invested their time and energy for developing an ultra-modern autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that can defy the current standard of manually operated drones.
The new AUV named Kraken 3.0 will be capable of conducting underwater surveillance, repair large underwater pipes and even help in finding and retrieving black box of a flight.
The name of the robotic vehicle comes from the legendary sea monster, which is believed to delve deep under the oceans surrounding the areas of Norway and Greenland. The new under water surveillance vehicle Kraken 3.0 is the successor of Kraken 2.0 and it is getting ready in the robotics development centre.
A student who is actively involved with the project Kraken 3.0 was quoted by NDTV saying that the robot will be able to go up to the depth of 10 meters. He also added that the robot, which is a task oriented machine, can also perform a hand-full of other specific tasks.
Abhay Kumar, who is leading the team of students, was quoted saying, “We pre-program it so that it can do specifically assigned tasks like underwater surveying, identifying lost objects or debris, picking them up, etc. It can also be used for conducting repairs under the hull of a ship.”
The students have embedded a hand-full of cameras and sensors into the robot allowing it to change direction if it identifies any obstacle on its way. The 1.3 meter long Kraken 3.0 has six-thruster models that can rotate in all five directions, allowing it to get a clear view of the underwater condition.
Unlike drones that are driven by people in the ground station, the new under water vehicle doesn’t need human inputs for navigation as it is capable of taking decisions so as to avoid collision.
Kumar said, “Once an AUV is under water it has to take its own decisions. Therefore it has a higher level of intelligence than drones. A powerful on-board computer is part of the machine.”
The students have used a technology called machine learning and if everything falls in place, the new robotic vehicle could mark the beginning of a new era in deep sea navigation and surveillance technology.
4 Comments
Good Job …
More such projects should happen from all other collages .
10 meters ???? Guys please read what you write ?
Dude it is 10 meters indeed, i thought it was a mistake too, but it isnt.
Superb stuff….DRDO and other defence research people..safeguard these genius..