Students In India Develop Kraken 3.0, An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

A team of students at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, has developed Kraken 3.0, a highly powerful and modern autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The students claim that Kraken 3.0 is superior to the current version of manually operated drones.

According to the development team, the underwater robot has the potential to repair underwater pipes and can even conduct underwater surveillance. In addition, the latest version of the AUV can help find and retrieve a lost "black box" recorder amid the debris of a crashed airliner.

NDTV Gadgets reported that Kraken 3.0 can automatically go 10 meters deep into water to perform assigned tasks. The AUV includes a powerful computer that can work underwater, enabling the 1.3-meter-long device to make its own decisions.

"We pre-program it so that it can do specifically assigned tasks like underwater surveying, identifying lost objects or debris, picking them up, etc. It can also be used for conducting repairs under the hull of a ship," said team leader Abhay Kumar, a fourth-year undergraduate student of ocean engineering and naval architecture at IIT Kharagpur.

The AUV also has powerful sensors and cameras for analyzing its surroundings. The six-thruster robot can even change course, in five different directions. The team has also programmed the robot to handle emergency situations that may arise underwater, eliminating the need for human intervention from the water's surface.

The student developers hope the gadget launches a new phase in which AUVs replace manually operated drones for deep-sea navigation and surveillance purposes.

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