Cave diving is, per attempt, the single most dangerous sport on Earth. The men and women who take it on are regularly faced with cave-ins, blackouts, and panic-inducing conditions. On average, 20 cave divers a year don’t come back from a dive.

Corey Jaskolski has been working on a project which aims to give cave divers an additional tool they can use to keep safe while in pursuit of their passion.

Jaskolski is the President of Hydro Technologies and also serves as a National Geographic Innovation Fellow. Using 3D printing technology, he is currently working on the development of a remotely operated vehicle that can assist with the exploration of underwater caves.

Previous versions of UROVs needed to be powered from the surface and required 400-foot-long cables, each a half an inch in diameter and made of heavy, solid steel to reach down into the depths. The NEMO carries its power supply on board, and though still tethered, requires only a thin, fiber-optic cable of less than 4 lbs in total weight to connect to the surface.Working with engineering students from Colorado State University and additive manufacturing experts from Solid Concepts, Jaskolski’s team built an Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (UROV). The NEMO (Nautical Exploratory Modular Observer) was built using Fused Deposition Modeling and Selective Laser Sintering.

“There are great archeological teams unable to afford current UROVs,” said Jaskolski. “They can barely afford to travel out to these places for exploration. If we can make UROVs readily available, affordable, portable and easily replicable – and get them in the hands of the right people – then we will be able to make amazing discoveries in our lifetime.”

Jaskolski and his team knew they’d have to find a better way to build their dream UROV, so they turned to Solid Concepts.

“If everything had to be made by machining or molding without freedom to design one-off or two-offs, this would not have been possible,” he said. “It would have turned into months of machining and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Using 3D printing technology, the NEMO took just a few weeks to design, 3D print and ready for testing.

Michael Hake was the lead engineer on the NEMO team at CSU, and he says the process resulted in an easy-to-assemble package which allows all servos and thrusters to connect directly to the NEMO’s outer shell. That meant fewer total parts and manual assembly steps are involved.

“You can easily remove the shell without losing parts and reassemble when you reach your destination,” Hake says.

And the NEMO is more than a pretty face. It’s built to comfortably withstand depths of more than 60 meters.

Hake says that analytic testing has indicated that the NEMO might well function down to 190 meters. He adds that the team designed NEMO to be small enough that a pair of hikers can carry it to a given location, and that it could operate for more than 90 minutes without interruption.

Source: 3dprint.com