Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
A few years ago CES unofficially hosted “the year of the drone” — everyone suddenly had a flying platform to show at the event, with big booths and demos from DJI, Parrot, and countless other global companies, showing everything from micro-sized flyers to multicopters big enough to carry substantial cargo loads.
Since then, drones have maintained a steady presence at CES, with autonomous electric personal transport being the latest to make noise in the space at last year’s show. This year, running through the drone area in south hall, you’ll still find the broad range of companies, but they now have a new set of neighbors — small underwater rovers. Lots of them. They come in bright nautical colors, oranges and yellows. Some are sleek, some look like small versions of scientific research vessels. A couple are even shaped like sharks, with propulsion generated from an undulating tail fin.
It’s an interesting development, especially from the perspective of the maker community. In 2011, David Lang and Eric Stackpole launched OpenROV with their desktop-sized Kickstarted underwater rover kit, bringing the ability to do underwater exploration to a new demographic, the amateur scientist. People quickly adopted their ROV for research, inspection, and to augment ocean adventures. The founders embody the core “maker” essence — two eternally curious minds that bonded on the promise creating a tool to help find lost treasure, and in doing so, created what quickly became the largest underwater robotics manufacturer, all run out of their Berkeley, Calif. offices. They iterated on the original design, pushing updates for better control and resolution, and in recent years launched a new Kickstarter for a new, refined and sleek underwater exploration platform called Trident. (Stackpole also starred on the cover of Make Vol. 34, and Lang authored the Make: book Zero to Maker.)
With their product, OpenROV also built a passionate community, centered on their OpenExplorer website (recently acquired by National Geographic). People gathered there to detail endeavors of all sorts — just just underwater — everything from building listening posts in the rainforest for illegal logging to building R/C sentries that chase hungry ravens away from hatchling desert tortoises.
There’s been a distinction between OpenROV’s products and the aerial drone segment, largely…
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