Design Challenge - September 2011

Lumede Design/Oliver Becker

The inspiration for the crab-roboter was the Deepwater Horizon desaster. We thought that there must be a better and more efficient way to get repairs done in the deep sea. The idea was, that a ground vehicle should be more capable to do repairs also with heavy equipment than a submarine, which due to being a swimming object, has two major disadvantages: It cannot handle heavy weights and it is moved by the surroundings currents of the water. So the idea of having a vehicle moving on the bottom of the sea was near and as the majority of the seaground population is 8-legged, we decided to do some crab-shaped roboter. Though the initial idea was to create a repair vehicle, it became quickly clear, that there are a lot of fields, in which the crab could be useful:
- maintenance of pipelines
- maintenance of cables (communication cables or power cables)
- maintenance of offshore-windparks
- rescue action on damaged submarines or underwater-stations
- harvesting of manganese nodules
- maybe even underwater farming/agriculture action, like harvesting of oysters, algae or other animals.
- scientific purposes
- maybe even touristic purposes.

When it came to design, after some fast and streamline scetches, we decided to go for the form-follows-function way, which surely is more apppropriate in deepsea. So the construction commanded in giving the form: On the front you have the cylindrical passenger cabin with its three windows. We need two upper windows for the driver and the gripper-pilot and we one more lower window to controll the smaller grippers. Behind the passenger cabin, you find four more tanks necessary to give as much autonomy as possible, so here are stored oxygen and the fuel cell based power management. Cabin and all tanks together are half covered by a plastic shell, which has only streamline function, to reduce resistence while swimming. Underneath the body you find the leg-rows, each side four legs made of alloy-construction with plastic covering. When diving down or travelling, all legs will be straightened and inclined backwards to give a more streamlined wing-shape. For underwater travelling you have one main propeller at the rear and two smaller steering propellers on the sides.

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CONTACT DETAILS

Website: www.lumede.de / www.oliverbecker.biz

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