A few pictures of Team Ox27 working on the movie ROV as well as a bit of the development story.
We were approached by Fredi in early summer 2013 regarding building an ROV to play one of the top contenders. As it turns out, the final school name for our ROV was not finalized till we were actually on set doing final cosmetic touches on the ROV's.
Additionally, The Typewriter Repairmen (associated with Nerds FRC 1726) as well as Falcon robotics (FRC 842) would also be building ROV's for the film.
The requirement was for each group to build 2 identical ROV's to play the top teams. One would be a spare as to not hold up filming if there was a failure on the one that was in use. Falcon would also build "Stinky" models at various levels of completion.
The special effects people had said they could only build prop ROV's that the divers would have to puppet. The 3 experienced build groups were approached because the film people wanted highly functional ROV's to give extra realism to the film. Because it was unprecedented not to have professional film industry builders to this, the insurer of the film would not sign off on the policy until they saw a demonstration of the ROVs in the water. It was a big plus that we had experience building highly functional machines with 6 week schedules before.
With filming to start in October 2013, We did not however get the go ahead till ~ last week of August. We expected the the game to be similar to the original 2004 game but were not 100% sure if there would be any added tasks for the movie. Those details were still being worked out. So we started designing a competition capable bot for the tasks that we knew. Typical stuff. Grabbing things, measuring temperature etc. The producers, director and production designer made a visit to Falcon Robotics in Phoenix to meet the ROV builders and brainstorm the game tasks and robot requirements. That session was great fun working with a critical mass of creative people.
On top of the functional requirements, the Production Designer for the film had aesthetic requirements that forced building larger ROV's than we would build for this type of event. They did not want the ROV's to be dwarfed by the 50 foot long submarine that would be the main prop for the game. Past ROV's that we built for NURC were ~ 18" x 24" x 12". These ROV's ended up 38 x 38 x 18".
We had never previously used graphics or paint for our competition ROV entries. We instead spent the time improving functionality. Yes, our past ROV's were really ugly. Not to say that other NURC teams did not have cool looking bots. The movie ROV;s however would have coordinated school colors graphics ... aesthetics. We underestimated how hard the production designer ( Rob Wilson King) would push on this to get it to his standards. The "Look" of everything in the film was Robb's responsibility.
Because I could not get back to PHX right away when we got the green light for the project, we basically had only ~5 weeks to get the ROV #1 designed and ready to ship for Oct 4, 2014. We had most of the ROV2 parts by that time as well.
After shipping ROV1, we worked for the next 2 weeks to finished ROV #2 to a higher level of aesthetics than ROV1. Then Borna and I drove it the ABQ set for filming. We spent a couple days on set getting both ROV's to the same level of updates and applying the Cornell cosmetics. We also had to make a physical addition that supported a plot element and this forced practice and learning the new handling characteristics of the ROV. We also built camera mounts for several other ROV's in the film.
With 5 degrees of freedom, a grabber and and some button enabled features, it took two of us to drive/control the robot for the film. The result was very smooth and precise.
The following pics are of some of the crew that built the ROV and you can see some of the parts that went into building it as well as a partial pic of the final product. The Cornell ROV can be seen briefly but clearly in the following videos.
For a moment,
You can see the robot at 0:18 and 1:47
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IthdmHTgmKw
Robot at 0:32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOLwIIHuCs
Robot at 0:31
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHylF2kjAJ8
Time lapse video of frame building.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yvutqczg23...Lapse.mp4?dl=0
Pics During fabrication:
I could not make the "embed photo" scripting work properly (using dropbox urls for the photo's) so a decent collection of pictures is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tai3qqpby...PpHVV9rwa?dl=0
A time lapse of Team 0x27 building a NURC ROV from scratch in 17.5 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv3hiGKKCic