Uncrewed Systems Technology 048 | Kodiak Driver | 5G focus | Tiburon USV | Skypersonic Skycopter and Skyrover | CES 2023 | Limbach L 2400 DX and L 550 EFG | NXInnovation NX 100 Enviro | Solar power focus | Protegimus Protection

62 that they are not designed for scale production, so there is not much impetus to push unit costs down. Although exact details about initial missions and some specifications remain confidential, Loveard comments, “Our current development effort with the RAN is progressing well, with a number of milestones having been reached within a rapid time frame of development. “That has validated our approach, but there is some way to go before we can publicly say exactly where we are heading with mission or payload specifics. I think any robotics company that doesn’t have the flexibility to adapt to the technology changes ahead and have a way to incorporate them effectively into their systems will be left behind very quickly.” Sustainablemining North American subsea mining company Impossible Metals is continuing to develop its Robotic Collection System, which has been conceived as a UUV swarm-based solution aimed at ecologically sustainablemineral extraction by autonomously harvesting nodule-type mineral deposits on the ocean floor. As Jason Gillham, CTO and co-founder of Impossible Metals, explains, “The world is facing a projected deficit in the amount of critical battery metals to support the transition to green energy and mobility. That is particularly so with cobalt and nickel, which are key to the highest energy-density lithium batteries, and terrestrial sources of these are either in short supply or problematic to extract from an environmental and social governance point of view.” The deep ocean, by contrast, contains several million tons of cathode minerals (along with other useful metals) in the nodules. They were formed over millions of years and sit quite accessibly on the seabed, particularly across the Pacific and Indian oceans and in the Gulf of Mexico. They could in fact be the world’s largest and greenest source of such minerals. “Conventional solutions for subsea mining using dredging-based technology will generate sediment plumes that could be damaging to aquatic flora and fauna that aren’t dredged from the seafloor,” Gillham observes. “Our AUVs by contrast are designed to hover over the seabed, and once in operation they won’t generate large sediment plumes. We’re programming them to autonomously use manipulator arms to selectively pick nodules from the ground, while leaving the life behind. We can also leave habitat and habitat corridors untouched, leaving some nodules to maintain ocean biodiversity.” Initial trials of its first, proof-of- concept prototype at 25 m depths have concluded successfully, with a second, larger prototype in development. Gillham points to some technologies that are key to Impossible Metals’ AUV. The first is the computer vision and depth sensing necessary for identifying nodules and their location relative to the UUV. “On our first prototype, the Eureka 1, we installed three stereo cameras for two main purposes – as a navigation aid through visual odometry and visual- inertial data fusion, for identifying nodules,” he explains. “That information is then processed so that the arm on the AUV can calculate and execute its nodule-picking.” As for the arm itself, existing underwater robots use arms with serial joints, where each joint is moved by those that are closer to the base of the arm, but this style of arm is relatively slow for what Impossible Metals needs. It has therefore developed what it believes to be the first underwater ‘delta’ robot arm, a parallel robotic system in which all the actuators sit at the base to allow the end effector (and by extension, any nodule it has picked) tomove quickly from location to location. “For now, the end effector on the Eureka 1 is a simple clawmechanism, but we’ve started a programme to investigate February/March 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The Eureka 1 AUV is Impossible Metals’ first prototype for harvesting mineral nodules on the seafloor; Eureka 2 is now in development (Courtesy of Impossible Metals)