At the first campaign of the “Alfred-Merlin”, the new ship of the Department of Underwater Archaeological Research, the experimental machine has been on several wrecks in the Mediterranean.
It is exactly 4:08rd, this February 11, 2022, when the message, so long, is finally launched in the Alfred-Merlin’s robotic command post, the ship of the Department of Subaquatic Archaeological Research and Underwater (Drassm), parked off Corsica: “490 meters. We are at the bottom and approaching.” 3D glasses posed on the nose, the back slightly curved forward, Professor Osama Khatib, Stanford University (California), strives to distinguish something on the screen that, facing it, diffuses the stereoscopic images sent by the cameras equipping both eyes of its humanoid robot, Ocean One. Only the right hand of the prototype is for the moment visible. Closed, it always holds firmly between its four mechanical fingers the handle of the grapple entrusted to it, a little earlier, on the surface.
The probe indicates 496 meters deep when, finally, the wreck of Francesco-Crispi designs a silhouette on the dark blue of the background. Grabbing the two arms back from the efforts that he will use soon to control, the roboticist takes control of the machine and directs it towards the huge liner cast by the English, in April 1943, by 507 meters bottom, off Bastia, with the 900 Italian soldiers then on board. Already, the rusty hull with gaping wounds of the martyred building approaches, unveiling, through the zooplankton mist and shrimp clouds frustrated by light, fireplaces, air sleeves and gateway. All in three dimensions and giving the eye the perception of the depths of this unheard-of landscape, made of an entanglement of devastated bridges, steel beams, tangled ropes and potentially rowed ropes in which slide enormous CERNER AND CONGRESS.
Two arms with seven joints
Ocean on the left, Ocean One runs along the ship by port, revealing flanks covered with thousands of encrusting organisms, sponges, lichens and white coral bushes … when Osama Khatib advises a half-collapsed railing To the cabins of the first classes. After rotating the robot’s head, it makes him raise an arm, which comes to pose and adjust the grapple on the balustrade, creating sensations of weight, hardness and roughness, instantly transmitted, beyond the 500 meters of the column of water, until orders. “Open The Hand! Open The Hand!” (“Open your hand!”), “He controls.
Two meters in length for a weight of two hundred kilos, a moving head and two eyes cameras, two arms with seven prolonged joints with four or five-fingers interchangeable hands, an orange color body in the shape of a sarcophagus equipped with eight propellers … Revoilà Ocean One. Or more exactly, the “K” version of this prototype of humanoid able to be controlled remotely for archeology operations in the submarine environment.
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