Seahog's Deep Sea Adventure

The development of the Seahog started in 2010. It is a third generation tethered underwater Remotely-Operated Vehicle currently in development by the Robotics and Agents Research Lab (RARL) within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town. The Seahog was established as an overhaul of two previous ROVs developed by various students within the same lab. The reason for building an in house ROV was to develop a cheap alternative to commercial offerings to specifically meet the needs described by the marine biology group at the University of Cape Town. They wanted an ROV mainly for marine life observation with a possibility of small sample collection. The Seahog was started by two master’s degree students after it was deemed unfeasible to improve upon the Challenger I or Robin (the names given to the two previous ROVs). Development of the open-frame ROV Seahog was then commenced. This design was perceived to be a better design compared with the two previous ROVs’ which were torpedo-shaped. This design choice offered more in terms of adaptability and maintenance as each functional feature was contained in its own module separate from other modules. For example, the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is housed in its own module, so in case of a navigation feedback breakdown, debugging would be easier to perform. Table 1 shows some of the specifications or characteristics of each of the three ROVs developed by the RARL lab over the years.