4.4: Remotely Operated Vehicles

This next piece of technology has become so popular that you can find it for sale on Amazon. Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) owe their inspiration to the human desire to find shipwrecks. While we commonly think of ROVs as a new technology, their origins date back to the 1950s, when French diver-photographer Dimitri Rebikoff (1921–1997) launched the first ROV, the Poodle. On its first mission in 1954, the ROV Poodle found ancient Phoenician shipwrecks more than 540 feet (165 m) deep (Marx 1990).

Of course, the most famous ROV discovery came in 2013 when the American ROV Odysseus located the remains of the tourist submersible, Titan. On June 18, 2023, the Titan imploded with five passengers aboard on a visit to the passenger ship Titanic at 12,500 feet deep (3.8 km) in the North Atlantic (Mongilio 2023). Titanic, as you know, collided with an iceberg in 1912 and sank, killing 1,500 people. More than 70 years later, an American-French expedition under the guidance of WHOI oceanographer Robert Ballard located the vessel using an ROV (e.g., Ballard and Drew 2021).

Modern ROVs serve a broad range of military, industrial, scientific, and commercial needs. They come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and capabilities (e.g., Moore et al. 2010). The smallest ones are barely the size of a toaster, while the largest ones are bigger than a compact SUV. Most “swim” using a system of propellers controlled via commands sent through a fiber-optic cable called a tether (Christ and Wernli 2014). The ROV operator, the pilot, may use a joystick on a control console to maneuver the ROV. If you’re good with video games, you would probably make a good ROV pilot, especially if you know a little oceanography (hint, hint).

Some ROVs have wheels or treads like a tank that permit them to crawl over the seafloor, but most resemble snowmobiles, with sleds stretching the length of the vehicle so that they can land gently on the seafloor. Depending on the application, an ROV may be outfitted with one or more manipulator arms, extendable, rotational appendages that accommodate a variety of specialized attachments. Grippers hold objects and grabbers can pick them up. Shovels can be attached for digging, tubes deployed for collecting sediments, suction devices used to collect animals, and any number of other devices for sampling and carrying out research (Sivčev et al. 2018). It’s quite the thrill to watch an ROV collect strange creatures never before seen by humans.

Many ROVs are equipped with cameras and banks of lights for high-definition photography and videography. Some even stream live over the internet. Oceanographers refer to this sensory technology as telepresence, a kind of virtual reality that lets viewers experience a place that is otherwise inaccessible to (most) humans. Telepresence allows land-based scientists (and you) to participate in missions, too. Experts from around the world watch the livestream and call in to offer scientific expertise and commentary on any of the features or organisms that the ROV encounters. Livestreams offer informative and occasionally goofy commentary on the geology, chemistry, physics, and biology of the seafloor. I confess to standing in line at the supermarket watching the live feed of an ROV camera probing the ocean depths from locations halfway across the world. Check it out next time they go live. (See https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/.)