Key points
- Jason Gillham, CTO/COO and co-founder of Impossible Metals, walks through Eureka II, described as the company’s proof-of-concept underwater collection system for selectively picking up nodules.
- The vehicle’s vision system uses deep-sea lights outputting just under 10,000 lumens paired with in-house-designed cameras that track nodules for delta-style robotic arms built with 2G Engineering actuators.
- Collected nodules are pulled through a tube into a hopper, while buoyancy is managed by water-filled glass spheres, Hydrospace motors and pumps, and vertical and horizontal thrusters from Copenhagen Subsea.
- The system runs on a 14 kWh battery pack from Nookton, is wired mainly with MacArtney subsea connectors, and carries an Imagenex scanning sonar for obstacle detection plus INS, DVL and USBL sensors for position tracking.
