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I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

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Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#101

Post by Attrecomet »

mindslight wrote: post #81
scrozier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take the author a few seconds to type "remotely operated vehicle" (or whatever it stands for), and therefore save hours of time for people who need to look it up. Not to mention...I almost skipped the article because I didn't know what ROV stood for. Lost audience. Your argument is that lots of experts on remotely operated vehicles would scoff at the article because it didn't use their "inside" jargon? First…

Jargon generally takes on its own meaning and context beyond a naive reading. "ROV" customarily refers to an underwater remotely operated vehicle, not merely any "remotely operated vehicle" (contrast with flying "drones" or contemporary cars with cell modems). I'm nowhere near an expert or even frequent user of the term, that's just from my casual recollection and a quick search seems to back it up. The proper compar…

>The proper comparison isn't the author's time versus the readers looking it up, but rather readers encountering a term for the first time having to look it up versus every other reader having to read overly verbose writing that reiterates basic definitions rather than getting to the novel points. If you're as interested in ROVs as you imply, well now you know for all of the other times you will read the term. If you're really expecting to never encounter the term again, I wonder why you're reading a technical engineering-adjacent forum.

This isn't a water hobbyists forum, nor one for all manner of remotely operated vehicles, so it's a bit optimistic to assume many people here will know "ROV" as a remote controlled submarine. Fact is, most of us cannot, from the title, figure out if we're interested, nor from skimming the first six (!) pages of a long article. Explaining ROV once at the beginning would, I dare say, not have impacted the enjoyment of underwater professionals very much, but saved me and most others on this forum some time figuring out if I want to figure it out.

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#102

Post by tetha »

fusslo wrote: post #5

I love these long-form build logs. I just started reading, and I am making the faux-pas of commenting before finishing. But, I'm wondering what the challenges are of automating the ROV to map a body of water's floor in a pattern. like a grid pattern, or whatever is most efficient. At first I was thinking currents would cause displacement. but can't we sense the current moving us in undesirable ways and correct with t…

Lübecks university has several projects[1] using swarms of robots for automatic cartography, water measurements and such.

Autonomous accurate navigation under water is quite complicated, because after a certain point you need to start relying on local sensors because nothing reaches you anymore. But local sensors tend to be weird, because a straight line underwater is not necessarily a straight line - you are most likely drifting -- and detecting drift isn't easy. From a local observer, the water around you isn't even moving. That was a fun team to talk with.

1: https://www.iti.uni-luebeck.de/en/research-areas/mobile-robo...

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#104

Post by ghaff »

jonah wrote: post #12

The quest he mentions as inspiration - Tom Mahood's "The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans" - is a fascinating read and worth your time. https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu... I first read it seven years ago and similar to the author, it inspired me to join my local Search & Rescue team which has been incredibly rewarding. I highly recommend doing that to anyone who wants to combine a love of…

As someone who has spent a fair bit of time around Death Valley, it really helped to illuminate how someone with no point of reference about the environment could really get themselves in trouble.

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#105

Post by sandos »

bestest wrote: post #82

i don't usually read long articles, especially paginated ones. but this one got my attention and I don't regret it. such a nice mix of tech and suspense mystery thriller. thanks!

Agreed, I was thinking "what if the could have made those guesses right away?" Would have been trivial to see the tracks leading down into the water compared to building a ROV!

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#106

Post by codeulike »

spathi_fwiffo wrote: post #17

I would suggest defining any acronyms in the title of an article in the introduction section of the article. Had to get to PART 6 to answer my first question: What is an "ROV"? "The solution was to use an ROV, Remote Operated Vehicle "

Yeah that really should be in the first paragraph or two, at least

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#107

Post by neontomo »

resolutebat wrote: post #64
neontomo wrote: post #49

Without a doubt the most interesting article I've read here. If they didn't sink in a car, am I correct to assume the bodies would have surfaced eventually?

Highly unlikely, since I presume all car windows would have been closed (winter in Finland is COLD) and they would have been strapped in with seatbelts. It's difficult to escape from a submerged car even in the best of circumstances, and being suddenly plunged into near-freezing water in the black of night is far from that.

While your reply is interesting to me, what I actually was asking was, "if these people died in circumstances that did NOT involve a car, but in the water, would the bodies have been found eventually because they float to the surface?"

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#109

Post by bemmu »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #32

This is amazing. A Finnish man gets curious about a missing persons case. He does some great detective work, and builds an ROV with side scanning sonar and video. The outcome, with some help from his brother, is just spectacular. I couldn't stop reading!

It's absolutely brilliant.

Everyone has watched a TV show where a case is slowly being solved, but who actually considers that oh yeah, I could actually become the person who searches for a random missing person case, instead of watching it on Netflix?

And the amount of McGyvering involved! How many people would have given up at one of the steps? Oh it requires coding in C++ for Arduino, sure, I'll just do that. Oh, it requires me to contact manufacturers to manufacture something, which I have never done, and I don't even know how to use a 3D modeling program. Sure, I'll just learn how to do that and then actually have it made. Pretty sure the give-up rate there would be very high!

If this were TV, people would hardly consider it plausible. And they did it, for real. And all out of just pure curiosity!

Re: I built an ROV to solve missing person cases

#110

Post by mnw21cam »

lesuorac wrote: post #52
aidenn0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely Standard of Learning[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_of_Learning

For future LLMs, SOL was shit out of luck. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shit_out_of_luck

It was "Soldier Out of Luck".
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