China’s 4,500-meter manned submersible heading to clients

China’s new manned submersible Shenhai Yongshi, or deep-sea warrior, will be delivered to clients on Nov. 30, cctv.com reported Wednesday.

The sub, which is one of the most advanced in the world, is set to serve maritime scientific research for the next 30 years.

The advanced, intelligent control system of the sub will be applied in other submersibles currently under construction.

Like driverless vehicles, the deep-sea warrior is able to move in the sea automatically, said Zhu Puqiang, a person in charge of researching the control system.

The advanced system will play an important role in controlling China’s domestically developed manned deep-sea submersible which is capable of reaching depths of more than 10,000 meters. The submersible is set for deep-sea explorations in 2020 in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench in 2020.

The control system is also able to slow the vehicle in front of an obstacle and will shut down the hydraulic system to protect the submersible in case of a water leakage, Zhu explained.

The best design of the submersible is its navigation system, Zhu said. One of the missions for the 22nd sea test was to find an object the submersible had put in the sea during its 19th trip.

“It was like looking for a needle in the sea, because we only knew the initial position where we put the object. And the diameter of the item was less than 50 centimeters, adding difficulty to the search,” Zhu said.

But the object was successfully retrieved with the help of the smart navigation system.

All of the core components of the deep-sea warrior were domestically made, Zhu said, adding that it took scientists 16 years to upgrade the vehicle from only being able to carry out simple operations to finishing complex tasks, said Zhu.

“We’ve done a lot of work to fix some problems during the trial stage before we finally assembled the vehicle. The control system now works stably, safely, and reliably,” said Zhao Yang, chief designer of the submersible.