| Summary: | Research in Arctic regions has increased significantly in the last years. Depletion of natural resources has required the oil and gas companies to search for alternative locations to harvest the natural resources. Arctic subsea environment contains significant territories still untouched. Strong tidal currents and uneven terrain of seabed poses difficult environment for the utilization of resources. The Academy of Finland has financed multiple research project focusing on the research of the Arctic environment. Project Seaspider focuses on the designing sustainable control systems to enable operation of parallel working manipulators, installed on seabed crawlers operating at the bottom of the sea. These crawlers are designed to surpass ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, operating underwater today. ROV is susceptible to tidal currents and requires to be connected to a surface vessel at all times. The surface vessel provides power and control to the underwater vehicle. The purpose of the thesis project is to design a hydraulic manipulator capable in operation in subsea environment. Thesis project is based on a Master’s thesis by Mikko Siven [1] titled "Design of hydraulic underwater robotic arm". The designed manipulator is used in the implementation and testing of the control system. Commercial components, such as HIAB loader crane as well as commercial actuators, such as rotary actuators, are used in the design. The design project focuses on the design and validation of mechanical parts as well as modification of the commercial components to accomplish six degree of freedom manipulator for subsea environment.
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