Tuesday 12pm, 24 October 2017

Creating the Trident: Engineering and Design Challenges of Underwater Drones and Bringing Hardware Products to Market

Colin Ho

Lead Product Designer - OpenROV

Abstract

Incredible challenges face the world's oceans and ecosystems today, from pollution and acidification to coral bleaching. The primary barrier for change is human and societal apathy, and the best way to combat it is through making the oceans accessible and real to more people. OpenROV's mission is to democratize ocean exploration through low-cost tools, and OpenROV has become the world's highest volume underwater robot manufacturer. Trident is the world's first accessible underwater drone, and this talk covers over the mechanical design, engineering, and manufacturing challenges of making an underwater drone that is an order of magnitude lower in cost.

Bio

Colin Ho is the lead product design engineer at OpenROV, working on democratizing underwater exploration. He has worked on Antarctic exploration robots, to education robots and consumer products. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cal in 2015.