What are Remotely Operated Vehicles?
ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles, are robots that go where humans can’t. Space probes may be regarded as remotely operated vehicles, though the term usually refers to the ocean-based tethered versions – remotely operated underwater vehicles. These are used for all sorts of useful purposes, like prospecting for submarine oil deposits or observing the underbelly of Antarctic pack ice. ROVs are important to humanity’s future, as they will be used to locate resource deposits deep underwater to meet our future needs. For instance, the ocean floor contains huge amounts of methane clathrate, a clean-burning fuel, and numerous manganese nodules, which can be used to make important alloys. ROVs were initially developed from funding by the US Navy in the 1960s. The initial interest was to recover sunken ships and other lost artifacts from the ocean floor. The world record for a scuba diver descent is only 318m (1,043ft), but state-of-the-art ROVs can dive as deep as 3,000m (9,842ft). This onl
