--In
1980 I was working as a fabricator and crew member
for a motorsports team on Long Island NY. We were
racing at Road Atlanta when I met Andrew Bazely,
one time mink farmer, now President of Tecnadyne.
Mr. Bazely had designed and built a very impressive
race car, we started talking and he hired me to
work at an underwater products company of his
in San Diego called Hydroscan. Working at Hydroscan
introduced me to a new industry of remotely controlled
underwater vehicles.--
--It
was then that I teamed up with Wes Gerriets to
start Schilling Development. Shortly afterwards
we were joined by my brother Reuben and Brent
Regan. Our focus was manipulator arms for use
on ROVs. Our first product was a servo-hydraulic
arm for use on Perry Recon vehicles. The hardware
was built over many long days and nights with
each of us participating in the design and fabrication
of the system. We had numerous ideas about what
improvements could be made that would make a more
reliable and more productive arm. When we showed
our demonstrator manipulator to potential customers,
they could clearly see that we had a well thought
out and executed design. This resulted in orders
for numerous units as well as requests for the
design of additional models. This lead to the
TITAN series of arms ( many more long days and
nights). We have always put a great deal of energy
into designing solutions aimed at making the user
more productive. I have had the good fortune of
working with and learning from some very innovative
people during my career. They have been colleges,
customers and vendors. The experience has taught
me that if you work hard and use your imagination,
anything is possible.--
--Based
on the success of our manipulator products, in
1998 we decided to start a long term development
program to produce a reusable set of hardware
and software building blocks that would allow
customers to build remotely controlled machines
for the deep ocean without having to design all
of the infrastructure pieces each time. The idea
came from our experience that most designs don’t
become reliable until you have built several copies,
so this would allow us to use all of the building
blocks over and over. This lets the builder focus
on the functions that are unique to that particular
machines purpose. We call this group of building
blocks to Remote Systems Engine (RSE). The first
application of the RSE has been our Quest ROV.
Canyon Offshore liked the philosophy and asked
us to build an ROV based on the technology. We
now have 5 Quests in the field, 4 with Canyon
and one with the University of Bremen. Other customers
have approached us to build a larger version of
the Quest with hydraulic propulsion so we are
now producing the Quest UHD which stands for Ultra
Heavy Duty. It can be ordered with 100 or 150
hp and thanks to careful engineering and a novel
pump control arrangement we think it will prove
to be the most powerful work class machine available.--
--We
are also building other deep ocean machines using
the RSE building blocks, including a sea floor
drill for taking core samples in 4000m water depths.
The idea of the RSE is that broad range of machines
can share spare parts and technician experience,
both of which can be hard to come by in the remote
locations that are typical of the offshore market.
Our plan is to keep adding applications in order
to build a critical mass of equipment in the field
along with an increasing base of experience among
the technical professionals that operate, service
and repair the machines offshore. This has been
key our success in the manipulator area. Most
of the technicians in the industry are familiar
with our equipment, and spare parts are available
at a moments notice. We have extended this philosophy
further with the RSE by engineering a set of building
blocks that can be used across many applications.
An example would be a situation where a customer
is operating a workover system and an ROV on a
job and both systems use the RSE building blocks.
In this case, the two crews could share spare
parts and technical knowledge in the course of
completing the job. I expect that our plans for
the broad application of our RSE, will take many
years to unfold. It is likely that we will become
engineered into new systems as they are designed
as well as providing solutions to retrofit existing
equipment that is based on electronics designs
that are too old to easily support.--
--Now
that we have finished the bulk of the development
on the RSE, we are working on updating our manipulator
products. Our first project is to enhance the
TITAN line with the introduction of the TITAN
4. This builds on the decade of reliability improvements
with a new slave control electronics assembly.
The revised electronics fit inside the forearm
of the manipulator, eliminating the need for a
separate bottle and costly multi-conductor cable.
We will be introducing this model later in the
year as well as retrofit kits to allow T3 machines
to take advantage of this new design.--
--We
are fortunate to have a group of competent employees
that are patient, persistent and dedicated. We
did not gain popularity in the manipulator market
overnight and expect that the popularity of the
RSE will take some time as well.--
>>
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