Designers gripped by deep-sea challenge
The robotic claw of a new ocean probe is a HK creation
A robotic claw designed by Hong Kong engineers will be used for deep sea exploration by Ifremer, a leading marine institute that helped find the wreck of the Titanic.
The local team also designed and built territorial-sampling tools for the ill-fated British Beagle 2 mission to Mars in December 2003.
'We'd like to name the claw le coeur d'une femme [a woman's heart], if Ifremer would let us,' said Ng Tze-chuen, a private dentist, referring to a common Chinese saying about a woman's heart being as unfathomable as the deep ocean.
'The gripper is designed to retrieve even a pin by blind-gripping or passive self-adaptive motion,' said Dr Ng who designed the claw with Yung Kai-leung, a Polytechnic University engineering professor.
The two developed advanced rock and soil samplers for the Beagle 2 probe that crashed on the surface of Mars.
The titanium claw, slightly larger than a human hand and weighing less than 1kg, will be attached to a robotic arm on Victor 6000, an unmanned submarine made by Ifremer which, with a reach down to 6,000 metres, is one of the deepest divers ever built.
The gripper must still undergo further tests, probably in October.
Vincent Rigaud, director of Ifremer's underwater systems department based in France, said: 'This system [by Dr Ng and Professor Yung] could be used on wreck exploration or for scientific purposes for deep sea exploration.'
Ifremer, an oceanographic, fisheries and environmental research agency of the French government and the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Deep Submergence Laboratory, discovered the Titanic wreckage in 1985.
