Virginia Tech’s DEEP-X Team Ready to Compete in Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE Competition
Last week, one of the 21 semifinalist teams picked to advance in the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE competition was Virginia Tech’s DEEP-X team.
The competition, which will award a total of $7 million throughout its duration, seeks to find unmanned and robotic technologies that can be used to advance tasks involving ocean exploration and discovery.
Virginia Tech’s DEEP-X team is led by Dan Stilwell's lab. Stilwell is a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the faculty advisor to the team. Stilwell, who is leading the team of 21 faculty members and graduate students, believes that this competition is a good opportunity to showcase how the school can work to explore the nearly 95 percent of Earth’s seafloor that has yet to be explored.
“With only 5 percent of the ocean surveyed, it's really hard for us to do things like populate high-fidelity models of the ocean to help us predict climate change,” Stilwell says.
“The technology exists, but it is much too slow and very expensive, so the XPRIZE competition is incentivizing the creation of more-effective technology that is dramatically faster and has a much lower cost.”
During the competition, the DEEP-X team will deploy multiple underwater vehicles, called Javelin, to autonomously work together as a team to map the seafloor, while also generating bathymetric maps, which show the depth of underwater features, similar to topographical maps.
According to Stilwell, the Javelins and the maps that they help generate could be used for a variety of tasks, including predicting climate change, as well as aiding in locating natural resources, and in search and recovery missions.
In September of this year, the DEEP-X team will need to use the Javelins to dive 2,000 meters underwater and map 100-500 square kilometers of seafloor within a 16-hour timeframe. By September of 2018, the Javelins will need to dive 4,000 meters underwater and map 250-500 square kilometers of seafloor within a 24-hour timeframe.
In the spring, the DEEP-X team will begin testing the prototype at sites in Virginia, to begin preparing for the first round of the competition.
