9-2. ds-ROV KAIKO

KAIKO system is the 10,000m class deep sea Remotely Operated Vehicle (ds-ROV) which has been developed for use in deep sea research that has not been possible by the existing manned submersibles for resons of ocean depth or sea floor topographies. The system will also be used for pre-site surveys and rescue for the manned submersible SHINKAI 6500.

KAIKO was constructed in 1995 and spent 2 years in the pre-practical use training for deep sea operation. In 1997, KAIKO obtained its own mother ship �gKAIREI�h and started their scientific deep sea observations.

�gKAIKO�h means the oceanic trenches in Japanese, which represent its ability to reach and operate samplings and manipulate various equipments in full ocean depth. Specifications and operational abilities were validate through repeated operation to 11,000 m at Mariana Trench (Takagawa et al., 1977). With the arrival of KAIKO, all sea floors of the world oceans have become in all fields of earth science particulary studies in around oceanic ridges and trench, and in deep sea biology including microorganisms. In this section, we briefly summarize KAIKO system and its operation in terms of geological study of deep sea research.

System description
The sysytem consists of two under water robots (called Launcher and Vehicle), cables, cable handling systems and a positioning system (Mikagawa et al., 1999, 2000). KAIKO is a dual ROV system, with Launcher serving as a wide area survey vehicle linked to Vehicle, which that functions as a precision multi-sensory imaging and sampling platform (descriptions are listed in Tables 1 and 2). Launcher is designed to carry out two types of missions. One is as a launch base for Vehicle and the other is as a stand alone towed vehicle system. Launcher is equipped secondary cable handling system and acoustic apparatus (Side Scan Sonar and Sub Bottom Profiler).
The mission of Vehicle is perform a detailed area survey and sampling tasks. High maneuverability is necessary for these operations To accomplish this mission, the buoyancy of the vehicle is set at 10 kg negative at the expected depth for each operation. Vehicle has seven hydraulic thrusters (4 for horizontal and 3 for vertical, respectively) giving it 6 degrees of freedom.

KAIKO is suspended from the ship with a 12,000m long primary cable handling sysytem installed on Launcher. Highly accurate Vehicle position control by an acoustic navigation system capacitate Vehicle various operation mode (Mikagawa et al., 1999). The positioning accuracy of Vehicle at 10,000m depth is within 25 m (Mikagawa et al., 2000). Whole system is controlled from mother ship KAIREI by more than 3 pilots / operators, of which control information is stored every 2 second with digital form (Table 2). In spite of the limit of secondary cable of 250 m in length, we could do detail observation and sampling up 1 km traverse as a maximum, of an application of vehicle-separated towing mode in 4 hours with 0.3-0.4 knot (described as wide area survey mode; Mikagawa et al., 1999)

References
Mikagawa, T., Fukui, T and �gKAIKO�h operation team (1999), 10,000 meter class deep seaROV
�gKAIKO�h and underwater operation. In �gThe annual reports ISOPE-99�h, Cupertino, CA.
Mikagawa, T., Fukui, T., Hirata, K. and �gKAIKO�h operation team (2000). On the 10,000 meter class
deep sea ROV �gKAIKO�h and its under water operation. Submitted to: �gTechno- Ocean 2000 Internatl. Symp�h
Takagawa, S., Aoki, S and Kawana, I. (1997), Diving to MARIANA TRENCH by KAIKO, in
�gRecent advances in marine science and technology, 96, pp 89-96.

Launcher specification

Vehicle specification

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