Deep ocean ROV operated coring device

This paper describes the requirements for and the design and development of an automatic deep ocean ROV operated bottom sediment coring device. The corer, designed to take cores in up to 7000 meters of water, was designed and tested in six weeks, integrated with a deep ROV and used to take samples along a potential deep water pipeline route. To the authors knowledge, this had never been done before from a ROV platform. In order for the device to be successful it had to be hydraulically operated and the core self-sealing (once the core had been taken) and automatically released, but not dropped. Multiple cores were taken by storing and replacing coring tubes in a the vehicle´s basket via the ROV´s manipulator