ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Lang - Maker
David Lang is a maker and the co-founder of OpenROV, a community of ocean lovers who build underwater robots.

Why you should listen

David Lang is a maker whose craving for adventure turned him into an amateur ocean explorer. A few years ago Lang and NASA engineer Eric Stackpole went looking for lost gold (literally) in an underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierra Navada. But they weren't quite sure how to go about it. Without much expertise (or money), the two put initial designs for an underwater robot explorer online. Soon OpenROV was born: a community of citizen ocean explorers who build and constantly improve upon these small remote operated underwater robots.

 Lang is also the author of Zero to Maker and a 2013 TED Fellow. He lives on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay.

More profile about the speaker
David Lang | Speaker | TED.com
TED2013

David Lang: My underwater robot

Filmed:
1,320,203 views

David Lang is a maker who taught himself to become an amateur oceanographer -- or, he taught a robot to be one for him. In a charming talk Lang, a TED Fellow, shows how he and a network of ocean lovers teamed up to build open-sourced, low-cost underwater explorers.
- Maker
David Lang is a maker and the co-founder of OpenROV, a community of ocean lovers who build underwater robots. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

00:13
(Aquatic noises)
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So this video was taken
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at Aquarius undersea laboratory
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four miles off the coast of Key Largo,
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about 60 feet below the surface.
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NASA uses this extreme environment
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to train astronauts and aquanauts,
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and last year, they invited us along for the ride.
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All the footage was taken from our open ROV,
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which is a robot that we built in our garage.
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So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle,
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which in our case means our little robot
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sends live video
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across that ultra-thin tether
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back to the computer topside.
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It's open source, meaning we publish
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and share all of our design files
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and all of our code online,
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allowing anyone to modify
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or improve or change the design.
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It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts
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and costs about 1,000 times cheaper
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than the ROVs James Cameron used
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to explore the Titanic.
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So ROVs aren't new.
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They've been around for decades.
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Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans.
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Oil and gas companies use them for exploration
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and construction.
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What we've built isn't unique.
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It's how we've built it that's really unique.
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So I want to give you a quick story
of how it got started.
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So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I
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decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave
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in the foothills of the Sierras.
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We had heard this story about lost gold
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from a Gold Rush-era robbery,
and we wanted to go up there.
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Unfortunately, we didn't have any money
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and we didn't have any tools to do it.
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So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot,
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but we didn't have all the parts figured out,
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so we did what anybody would do in our situation:
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we asked the Internet for help.
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More specifically, we created this website,
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openROV.com, and shared
our intentions and our plans
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For the first few months, it was just Eric and I
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talking back to each other on the forums,
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but pretty soon, we started to get feedback
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from makers and hobbyists,
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and then actually professional ocean engineers
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who had some suggestions for what we should do.
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We kept working on it. We learned a lot.
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We kept prototyping, and eventually,
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we decided we wanted to go
to the cave. We were ready.
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So about that time, our little expedition
became quite a story,
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and it got picked up in The New York Times.
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And we were pretty much just overwhelmed
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with interest from people who wanted a kit
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that they could build this open ROV themselves.
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So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter,
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and when we did,
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we raised our funding goal in about two hours,
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and all of a sudden,
had this money to make these kits.
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But then we had to learn how to make them.
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I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing.
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So we quickly learned that our garage
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was not big enough to hold our growing operation.
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But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made,
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thanks a lot to TechShop,
which was a big help to us,
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and we shipped these kits all over the world
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just before Christmas of last year,
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so it was just a few months ago.
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But we're already starting to get video
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and photos back from all over the world,
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including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica.
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We've also learned the penguins love robots.
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(Laughter)
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So we're still publishing all the designs online,
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encouraging anyone to build these themselves.
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That's the only way that we could have done this.
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By being open source, we've created
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this distributed R&D network,
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and we're moving faster than
any venture-backed counterpart.
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But the actual robot is really only half the story.
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The real potential, the long term potential,
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is with this community of DIY ocean explorers
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that are forming all over the globe.
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What can we discover
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when there's thousands of these devices
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roaming the seas?
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So you're probably all wondering: the cave.
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Did you find the gold?
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Well, we didn't find any gold,
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but we decided that what we found
was much more valuable.
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It was the glimpse into a potential future
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for ocean exploration.
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It's something that's not limited to
the James Camerons of the world,
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but something that we're all participating in.
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It's an underwater world
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we're all exploring together.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Lang - Maker
David Lang is a maker and the co-founder of OpenROV, a community of ocean lovers who build underwater robots.

Why you should listen

David Lang is a maker whose craving for adventure turned him into an amateur ocean explorer. A few years ago Lang and NASA engineer Eric Stackpole went looking for lost gold (literally) in an underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierra Navada. But they weren't quite sure how to go about it. Without much expertise (or money), the two put initial designs for an underwater robot explorer online. Soon OpenROV was born: a community of citizen ocean explorers who build and constantly improve upon these small remote operated underwater robots.

 Lang is also the author of Zero to Maker and a 2013 TED Fellow. He lives on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay.

More profile about the speaker
David Lang | Speaker | TED.com

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