Development, Sea trial and Application of Haidou Autonomous and Remotely-operated Vehicle for Full-Depth Ocean Detection

This paper introduces the development, sea trial and application of a new type of underwater vehicle, Haidou, the first underwater vehicle in China diving to a depth of more than 10000 meters and serving for the national full-depth ocean scientific exploration, with the goal of being capable of reaching to the deepest area of the whole global ocean and collecting the surrounding parameters and video data there. For the hadal trench exploration up to 11000 meters, the concept of ARV technology is proposed, and the parametric modeling and multi-objective optimization design methods are used for the purpose of verification of full-depth ocean technology and highly efficient deep-sea detection ability. The vehicle named as Haidou was developed eventually, and field trials were carried out in Mariana Trench during the first comprehensive scientific expedition of China in 2016. With new mission, Haidou came back to the Challenger Deep of Mariana Trench at the beginning of 2017, Thanks to this micro cable with a length of 40 km, the ARV operation approach of Haidou combine the AUV mode under human supervision with the ROV mode capable of being tele-operated at the bottom of the deepest area in global ocean, and made it possible that the operators on the mother ship can obtain environmental data including the real-time optical video of the unusual deep sea bottom with the real-time remotely control for more than 4 hours. In the near future, Haidou will play a more important role in the national hadal trench scientific exploration.