David Lang, a 29-year-old Minnesota sailor, and Eric Stackpole, a 28-year-old NASA spacecraft engineer, started working on creating an affordable sea exploration robot three years ago. Their goal was to use the device to search for legendary buried treasure that a group of Native Americans stole from miners back in the 1800s and hid is a deep well. They ended up creating OpenROV, a sea exploration robot that costs only $849 and can dive deeper than sunlight.
The device is two-and-a-half feet wide by a foot high and all you have to do to get one is buy the materials and check out OpenROVs site for step-by-step instructions. It started with a Kickstarter success that provided the two with $111,000 and an additional $1.3 million from venture capital firm True Ventures.
The project has progressed at an incredibly fast rate due to its open-sourced nature, which also makes it difficult to track and impossible to know just how many of these robots currently exist. Being so easy to make and affordable, you can expect to see more amateur treasure hunters than ever before. Even if you’re not seeking to get rich quick, OpenROV opens a world of deep water opportunities.
Source – USA Today