Seahog's Deep Sea Adventure

                            The development of the Seahog started in 2010. It is a third generation tethered
underwater Remotely-Operated Vehicle currently in development by the Robotics
and Agents Research Lab (RARL) within the Department of Mechanical Engineering
at the University of Cape Town. The Seahog was established as an overhaul of two
previous ROVs developed by various students within the same lab. The reason for
building an in house ROV was to develop a cheap alternative to commercial offerings
to specifically meet the needs described by the marine biology group at the
University of Cape Town. They wanted an ROV mainly for marine life observation
with a possibility of small sample collection. The Seahog was started by two master’s
degree students after it was deemed unfeasible to improve upon the Challenger I or
Robin (the names given to the two previous ROVs). Development of the open-frame
ROV Seahog was then commenced. This design was perceived to be a better design
compared with the two previous ROVs’ which were torpedo-shaped. This design
choice offered more in terms of adaptability and maintenance as each functional
feature was contained in its own module separate from other modules. For example,
the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is housed in its own module, so in case of a
navigation feedback breakdown, debugging would be easier to perform.
Table 1 shows some of the specifications or characteristics of each of the three ROVs
developed by the RARL lab over the years.