Underwater Drone Technology

Finding ways to overcome physical limitations so that humans can dive deeper and stay underwater longer has been an ongoing quest. Back in the 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci drew sketches of a submarine and a robot. Had he thought to combine the two concepts, he would have created a prototype of an unmanned underwater vehicle, or underwater drone. Instead, the world had to wait another five hundred years.

In the 1950s, in response to sea mines that would go on to destroy or damage more naval ships than all other types of attacks, the U.S. Navy began developing an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) that could dive 10,000 feet (rated depth) and function for four straight hours. In the succeeding decades, the Navy developed UUVs that could retrieve lost equipment such as torpedoes or a missing atomic bomb, save submarine crews lost at sea, or locate shipwrecks, including the Titanic. At the beginning of the 21st century, UUVs increasingly became a faster, cheaper, and safer alternative than sending humans and trained animals to defuse sea mines. For example, it takes a team of human divers 21 days to clear sea mines in one square mile, but a UUV such as the Hydroid REMUS can complete the task in only 16 hours.