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Designers gripped by deep-sea challenge

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Alex Loin Toronto

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.

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