The humanoid robot Ocean One was discovered by the public during the inauguration of Memory to the Sea exhibit, which was celebrating the 50 years of the french underwater archaelogical.
Ocean One’s birth
In January 2014, Michel L’hour and Vincent Creuze met Oussama khatib, a robot constructor, who spoke to them about his project of an archaelogical underwater robot. The three men decided to work together on this project. A year after the prototype of Ocean One was done !
An underwater robot with human appearence
This diver robot, with two meters long and 396,832 lbs equipped with a head, two eyes, two articulated arms extended with a three-fingered hand, really has a human appeareance. He’s able to go down in the ocean until 1 000 meters deep, to work where no human is able to go. It moves with the help of little engines propellers, and its eyes are equipped with a high definiton camera. Ocean One is linked to the surface thanks to a wire which allows the connexion of data. The goal of this diving robot isn’t to replace human but to fill his lacks, such as going down to dephts the human body can’t handle.
Ocean One explore “La Lune”
To prove himself, we carried him a mission , the exploration of the famous wreck “The Moon”, prestigious boat of Louis XIV. In 1664, this vessel was coming back from the Algeria expedition when it was destroyed off the coast of Toulon. But the Sun King wanted to hide the desaster and The Moon is forgotten ! We had to wait until 1993 for the wreck, laying at 90 meter of depth, to be discovered by a sailor in an unbelievable conservation status.Its archaeological exploration started in 2012.It was directed by Michel L’hour, director of DRASSM Department of Subaquatic and Underwater Archeological Research.
It was the very first time an underwater humanoid robot went down , as an archaeologist, at such a depth. And during this mission, the first object winded up by the diver humanoid robot is a little catalan jar from the 17th century, meeting of two eras, what a symbol ! This mission was a succes, Ocean One succeed at exploring the Moon as an archaeologist would have done, it knew how to work as a scientist but his advantage on them was that he could go down to depths forbidden to human. A new generation of robots was born !
