Cellula Robotics Ltd. (CRL) is a privately owned company dedicated to the development of innovative automated and teleoperated equipment, primarily for subsea geotechnical and geophysical operations. Our primary market areas are:
- remotely operated seafloor drills and seafloor drilling components & tools;
- control systems for seabed intervention.
Our objective is provide our clients with engineering services of the highest standard. CRL was founded in 2001 and has been steadily growing ever since. We are based in the Vancouver region of British Columbia, Canada, but travel worldwide on behalf of our clients.
Expertise
Our areas of expertise include:
- Robotics & Control Systems
- Subsea Engineering
- Rock-Cutting, Drilling, and Sampling Systems
- Electro/Mechanical/Hydraulic Systems Development
- Dynamic Systems Design and Analysis
- Subsea Survey Planning & Operations
- Project Management
Cellula Robotics is well connected in the subsea, robotics, geotechnical, and geophysical survey industries. The company can quickly assemble a team of engineers and manufacturers to take on complex projects in robotics, automation, and teleoperated systems.
Clients
Over the past several years, Cellula and its employees have delivered robotic design and consulting services to many clients. Here are just a few:
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Areas Of Focus
Seafloor Drills, Components, Tools
Cellula’s largest market area is in the design, development, and integration of remotely operated seafloor drills and seafloor drilling components & tools. These devices are used in offshore site investigations and in subsea mineral exploration.
Ground-Engaging Robots / Rock-Cutting Robots
Cellula has been working in the area of ground-engaging robots, both terrestrial and subsea, since the end of 2000. Most of this work has been in the area rock-cutting, and the rock strengths have varied from 20MPa to 230 MPa.
Cellula has direct experience in using various types of cutters, e.g. pick-drum cutters, disc cutters, multi-disc cutters, and roller-button cutters. This experience includes extensive instrumented performance testing of these various types of cutters.
Robots are ideal as delivery platforms for mechanical cutting systems. The fact that they are unmanned removes the operators from the vicinity of the rock face. The lack of a local operator allows the machine to be custom-designed to fit into tight slots or trenches. Furthermore, the onboard controllers can control the mechanical impedance of the cutter against the ground, thereby improving cutter life and cutter efficiency.
Recently, Cellula has started to work in the area of geophysical coring in subsea environments.
Autonomous Robots
Autonomy is a measure of supervision. Different work tasks require different levels of supervision based on their degrees of freedom, their bandwidth, and their uncertainty.
A paper-weight is an autonomous robot with zero degrees of freedom and zero bandwidth. How well it performs its task is a function of the uncertainty in the definition of the task. E.g. if the paper-weight is subjected to unpredicted forces, e.g. bumping, high winds, or tipping, it won’t do its job properly.
Hierarchical controllers are a general solution to the design of autonomous robotic systems. The work task can usually be broken down into a hierarchy, and the various levels in the hierarchy can be addressed by nested controllers.
Cellula has extensive experience in the design, development, and testing of autonomous robot control systems, and it uses its own established approaches to solve these problems.
View Cellula’s collection of white papers.