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.