Revolutionizing Underwater Inspections: ROVs to the Rescue!
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is turning to cutting-edge underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to inspect America’s aging locks and dams—without halting vital shipping traffic or risking diver safety. Developed and tested by the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), these powerful, sensor-packed ROVs dive deep into murky waters, detect cracks, and diagnose issues with precision—saving time, money, and lives. Originally acquired for military use, ROVs are now transforming civil works by providing high-quality, real-time data, even in zero-visibility conditions. ERDC’s interdisciplinary team is leading the charge, turning off-the-shelf tech into a game-changing tool for infrastructure inspection and national resilience.
Transcript
00:00:00 The US Army Corps of Engineers or USACE manages hundreds of locks and dams which are critical components of a complex navigation system that is central to our nation's economy and security. Inspecting this aging aquatic infrastructure often requires costly and dangerous processes such as deploying divers or deatering structures which
00:00:36 shuts down the flow of goods and materials. To help USACE districts perform these inspections in a safer and more cost-effective manner and with higher quality, the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center or Eric has been testing the use of an underwater remotely operated vehicle or ROV. I a former Navy diver, former Marine Corps combatant diver. I'm well
00:01:00 aware of the dangers of diving. And anytime you send a person into the water, there's an inherent risk. And the the underwater RV, what allows us to do is to do a pre-sight inspection. So we can understand what the problem is. And that then allows the dive teams to plan properly to optimize their dive time to really go directly to the brute of the problem and fix the problem and get out.
00:01:26 The these locks and dams are still operational. So we don't shut down shipping traffic to perform the survey. And whereas if we have humans in the water, we absolutely have to shut that down. And so, not only are we able to perform the surveys, but we're also able to maintain shipping traffic, which is a benefit to our our industry. Eric researchers initially began working with
00:01:50 this ROV technology as a part of a military focused project. However, they soon realized that this capability could also be applied to solve a pressing civil works challenge. ROV was purchased to support an operation looking at underwater unexloded ordinance. And so that's kind of what we initially bought the ROV for. But then we quickly found out, you know,
00:02:11 after using the sonar and the laser scaling images and the video and things like that that we could, hey, you know, let's go off and inspect things or, you know, after we're inspecting things, let's get into the research side of things. It has been deployed in the Chicago electric dispersal barrier to identify broken billets without any disruption to
00:02:30 the canal's ship traffic. It has dived more than 80 ft down a vertical shaft to identify a large crack inside a culvert. It's a pretty powerful uh little thing, so it could operate in some highish uh currents. Um it's it's small enough to fit into a lot of the smaller uh culverts and everything. And we have a really powerful uh multi-beam sonar that allows us to operate in really murky
00:02:58 murky water. The brains would be the all the sensors, the cameras. They they tell you all the information that's happening around you. The uh the rover is just kind of the the vessel where that you're carrying all these uh cameras and sensors with. We have done some modifications like attaching a uh a spray bottle to the the gripper arm to squirt dye into certain
00:03:17 situations to see where it flows into cracks and stuff or if there's any flow at all. Looking for, you know, cracks in a in a bulkhead. In the New Orleans Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, the underwater ROV's multi-beam technology provided usable imagery in murky conditions with near zero visibility. This allowed engineers to diagnose and address the cause of a gate valve
00:03:40 malfunction. Prior to using the underwater ROV, the district had unsuccessfully tried other methods and was considering the need to dewater the canal, which enables the passage of $4 million of commodities each day. I think with this technology, there's a there's a real opportunity here to just gather a lot of data that people have always kind of been scratching their heads and
00:04:01 wondering, you know, is it really like that? You know, is the estimate correct? By conducting research into how to best use this off-the-shelf technology for underwater inspections, the ERIC team can test, validate, and develop systematic approaches and best practices. Their insight will help USA districts know what works and what doesn't and will enable them to fully
00:04:25 capitalize on the transformative potential of ROVs for underwater inspections. One of the the great powers of ERIC is the the fact that we do have such interdisciplinary teams. We have folks that are experts in operating in the environment. We have engineers who are uh experts in in how to uh develop back-end networks or software. uh we
00:04:48 have experts in AI and autonomy. We have uh experts in sensors and how we view and see the world. Um that is one of the great powers of Verdict and that's one of the reasons why I really enjoy working at a place like this.