A B S T R A C TThe untethered remotely operated vehicle (uROV) PICASSO-1, which is controlled in real time from a surface support vessel via a ϕ0.9 mm fiber optic cable, is capable of dives to 1,000-m depth at a duration of up to 6 h and yet is deployable from ships of sizes as low as 17 tonnes. The vehicle was developed at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, has carried out 63 dives to date, and is now operable by a team of four biologists and one technician. PICASSO-1 can collect video (HDTV × 1, NTSC × 3) and environmental information (depth, temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen concentration, fluorescence [chlorophyll a proxy], turbidity) concurrently, and this is output with vehicle heading, camera zoom, and other vital statistics via Ethernet. Acoustically obtained vehicle position information, deck and control room video, and sound data streams are also output via Ethernet, and the whole dive is recorded in a synchronous fashion on a logging/playback system that enables dives to be re-enacted in their entirety to facilitate analyses back in the laboratory. Operations have been successfully carried out overseas using a chartered dive boat, and the system represents a leap forward for exploration of the oceans to significant depths but at relatively low cost and with no loss in data quality.

So far, a special net is used to sample marine organism such as planktons in the marine biology. It is called as a plankton-net. However it often breaks the tissue of the marine organism. So scientists of the marine biology demand a good tool to observe the marine organism instead of the plankton-net sampling. On the other hand, an underwater vehicle has been a focus of constant attention in order to observe the marine organism. The vehicle should be equipped with devices to observe the marine organism and measure the sea characteristic. So Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) has developed a new underwater vehicle “PICASSO”. It is small size vehicle, but it can be equipped with various observation and measurement devices. And also it can be applied to a small ship as its own support ship owing to its size. In this paper, the outline of PICASSO and its key technologies are described, and results of sea trials carried out until now are shown.

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