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www.sea-technology.com December 2015 / st 29 P oodle and Snoopy aren't names commonly associ- ated with the offshore industry, but they represent a revolu- tionary breakthrough in subsea technology as the frst tethered ROVs that were developed more than half a century ago. Credit for the world's frst civilian ROV probably goes to French diver Dimitri Rebikoff. Frustrated that some Mediterra- nean wrecks were too deep to investigate, he installed a cam- era within pressure-resistant housing, then added a water- corrected lens and mounted it on a tether-controlled vehicle that he dubbed Poodle. For extra, treasure-fnding skills, he added a magnetometer and sonar set. Poodle's debut deployment in 1954 saw it send- ing up a video of two previously unexplored Phoenician wrecks, one at 700-ft. depth. U.S. Navy laboratories and contractors built other cam- era-carrying ROVs, one being Snoopy in 1972, which was notable for its reliance on direct hydraulic drive with the power transferred from tender to vehicle through a long tether hose. In comparison, today's ROVs all rely on electri- cal power. The frst ROV with manipulator arms was developed by a U.S. Navy laboratory in California and known as CURV (cable-controlled underwater recovery vehicle). Original- ly tasked with bringing back torpedoes that failed to rise to the surface after test shots, CURV-I made international news in 1966 off Palomares, Spain, where an H-bomb had plummeted into the Mediterranean Sea after a bomber col- lision. The bomb was resting precariously on the lip of a steep slope in a skein of parachute shrouds that had tangled with the manned submersible Alvin when it had tried to at- tach lifting shackles. Though lying well below CURV's rated depth of 2,850 ft., CURV reached the bomb without inci- dent and fnished the rigging job. Outside of the military, it was the oil and gas industry that advanced ROVs com- mercially by recognizing how the technology could support the development of offshore oil felds. As a result, commercial ROVs were created in the 1970s with two of the frst Hydro- Products: the RCV-225 and the RCV-150. Many other frms developed a similar line of small inspection ve- hicles. ROVs have become es- sential due to new offshore developments exceeding the reach of human divers. While the ROV sector suffered a serious stagnation in development in the mid-1980s, mainly because of the oil price drop and global recession, technological advancements have since accelerated dramatically with today's ROVs performing nu- merous tasks in many felds, including offshore renewables. One of the most prominent advances in ROV evolution has been the meteoric rise of electric vehicles and the sig- nifcant growth in their in size and capabilities. Such is their rapid emergence that many people debate whether they're closing in on their larger hydraulic cousins. ROV Classes Due to varying opinions and criteria about how different ROVs should be defned, Sub-Atlantic follows the Interna- tional Marine Contractors Association guidelines, entitled R018, which classes ROVs as: Class I—a small, compact ve- hicle that can carry camera/lights and sonar only, primarily intended for pure observation; Class II—vehicles ftted with two simultaneously viewable cameras and a sonar as stan- dard, capable of handling additional sensors as payload, and may have a basic manipulative capability; and Class III—large enough to carry extra sensors and/or manipulators without loss of functionality and are generally larger and The Evolution Of ROVs Electric Versus Hydraulic ROVs By Ryan Lumsden Sub-Atlantic's fagship Comanche vehicle, which was designed to bridge the gap be- tween observation- and work-class systems.