Underwater inspection is a job with many variants and one common problem.
Checking a dam wall, a ship's hull, a harbour approach and an oil storage tank are different tasks needing different sensors, and buying a purpose-built robot for each is out of reach for most of the organisations that need the work done.
The alternative is one machine that transforms.
A modular robot takes different payloads for different jobs, so the same vehicle inspects a bridge pier one week and monitors a reef the next.
The engineering is harder, since a platform that must accept many configurations cannot be optimised for any one of them, but the economics are better for a buyer who inspects occasionally.
