The First Commercial Remotely Operated Vehicle

[Oceanaut]

Excerpted from The History of Oilfield Diving: An Industrial Adventure
by Christopher Swann (Oceanaut Press)​

The first person to operate a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in an oilfield setting was probably John Culbertson, a former Oceaneering vice-president for the US Gulf Coast and Central and South America, who set up as Martech International. The company was based in Morgan City, Louisiana, with money from Enterprise Products, the very substantial firm that was Culbertson's fifty percent partner. Culbertson had learned that Hydro Products, a San Diego manufacturer of underwater television cameras, lights and oceanographic equipment, had developed what amounted to a swimming television camera for the US Navy. The device was called the RCV-125: RCV standing for "Remotely Controlled Vehicle."

Hydro Products were tight-lipped about what the Navy was doing with this "flying eyeball", but it was fairly clear that its small size and approximately spherical shape were dictated by the need to pass through a submarine's torpedo tube, presumably to run reconnaissance. Culbertson, who was as concerned as his former colleagues about the potential long-term effects of exposing divers to extreme pressure, saw the RCV-125 as a promising alternative to divers for deep inspection work. It was also a way to attract business. Seaway Diving of Norway bought the first unit that was sold to a commercial customer; Culbertson bought the second.

Although the industrial use of Remotely Operated Vehicles or ROVs (Hydro Products registered the name RCV) began with the RCV-125, it was not the first ROV. The first person to build such a vehicle appears to have been the Frenchman Dimitri Rebikoff, well known for his work in underwater optics and photography, who produced an unmanned cable-controlled version of his Pegasus, a torpedo-like craft equipped with a camera and strobe that was piloted by a scuba diver.

In 1965 the US Naval Electronics Laboratory in San Diego followed with the Cable Controlled Underwater Recovery Vehicle (CURV), the device which in April 1966 caught the world's attention by bringing up a lost hydrogen bomb from 2,850'/869M beneath the Mediterranean. Although the recovery owed much to chance—CURV inadvertently snarled the bomb's parachute—it was nonetheless an impressive demonstration of the new technology. Over the next eight years, the governments of Britain, France, Norway, the United States and the USSR paid for the construction of about a dozen ROVs, for military use or for conducting geological surveys. In Britain, there was the further impetus of the diving accidents in the North Sea, which prompted Sir Hermann Bondi, the chief scientist at the UK Department of Energy, to initiate an effort to try to replace divers with machines: a research program that became known as the Bondi Initiative.

For two years or so, Martech had the ROV business in the United States to themselves. The first operation took place in 1975 in the Gulf of Mexico, with support from S & H Services, a company started by Jack Smith, one of the first Gulf Coast oilfield divers. As delivered to Martech, the RCV-125 system consisted of three components: the vehicle, made up of a pressure housing containing the motors, television camera and electronics, surrounded by a syntactic foam hull and propelled by four thrusters; a control station with the television monitor and power supply, and a hand controller with which the operator piloted the vehicle.

Rear view of Martech’s RCV-125 on its first outing. The wire mesh cages were added to prevent stray lines and debris from being drawn into the thrusters (Jack D. Smith)​

Initially there was no winch; the vehicle was simply lowered into the water on a line passed through the lifting eye. Although the RCV-125 was rated to 1,250'/380M, how deep it could go was naturally limited by the length of the umbilical and, more importantly, by the drag it exerted on the vehicle, especially in a current. In practice, this was no more than a few hundred feet. Therefore, in 1977, Hydro Products introduced an underwater launcher or deployment cage which carried the vehicle to working depth, where it motored out to do its inspection. It then re-entered the cage for transport back to the surface.

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[Oceanaut]

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Experience with the RCV-125 soon led to a fully-fledged commercial version, the RCV-225, which Martech also ordered. The second American customer for the vehicle was Taylor Diving, a company that became a major operator of ROVs.

The RCV-225 was a great success. As John Lawrence of the former British submersible and ROV builder OSEL observed:

"Hydro Products had something nobody else had and margins were high, so they pumped the profits into research and development. It was lovely. The RCV-225 did a lot of work; nobody had been able to look under water before and move around, unless you sent a diver or a submersible down."

By 1983, there were 56 RCV-225s at work around the world.

After buying the RCV-125, Martech set up a separate division and hired an engineer to manage it. The company also enlisted electronics technicians to maintain and operate its vehicles, but found that divers, who were used to finding their way around a structure without becoming entangled, generally made better pilots. Nonetheless the technicians were still needed to keep the vehicles running, and eventually they became good pilots themselves. Necessity being the mother of invention, the crews soon devised ways of extending the remote eyeball's capabilities, for example by rigging up a hook or arm to take down a messenger line and reeve it through a shackle.

Initially the typical diver, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, regarded the robot vehicle as a threat. The oil companies, on the other hand, were enthusiastic. For inspections beyond 200'/61M—and many of the deeper dives were for inspection—the little vehicles were less expensive than divers. They were also more effective because an engineer could see the situation for himself instead of having to rely on a diver's description or drawing. To make sure the industry knew what was on offer, Martech set up a tank at the annual Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, where they gave oilmen a chance to try their hand at piloting. Considering how profitable ROVs were for Martech almost from the start, Culbertson was surprised his competitors did not get into the business sooner than they did—even if, as some thought, he initially offered the ROV at no charge as a sweetener for obtaining diving contracts. (In the early years, an RCV-225 went out for some $3,500 a day, an unheard of rate for an inspection vehicle compared with the start of the 1990s.)

Another American company who went into ROVs early on was Michel Lecler Divers of Harvey, Louisiana. In 1974–77, Chris Nicholson, then employed by Lecler, developed a vehicle named the Recorp Mk 3, which he built using components from military salvage yards and various other sources. Michel Lecler Divers was subsequently bought by the Dutch company Smit International, for whom Nicholson designed and built three ROVs: a nuclear inspection vehicle, a 30 h.p. hydraulic salvage-claw ROV, and the Smit Sub 1000 oilfield vehicle.

In January 1982, Nicholson started his own company, Deep Sea Systems International. His first product was the Articulator, a mini-manipulator for the RCV-225 and other small ROVs. In October 1983, Nicholson introduced the MiniRover, a 60-pound ROV that sold for under $30,000, the first of a new category of vehicles referred to as "Low-Cost ROVs".

In 1976, Martech did the initial work for the setting of Exxon's platform Hondo in the Santa Barbara Channel, at 850'/259M and entirely with ROVs. Later they installed the tanker-loading monobuoy in 500'/152M of water, using ROVs and saturation diving. The planning for putting in the mooring system went on for a year, largely under the direction of Jerry Ruse, an old hand from the early days of helium diving. The actual job was completed in 26 days, at a very substantial profit.

Despite such successes, several years later as a result of a disastrous decision to diversify into pipe laying, Martech was forced to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code. Meanwhile, the company had bought what must have been one of the first TROV vehicles from the Canadian company McElhanney Offshore Surveying and Engineering—later International Submarine Engineering (I.S.E.)—and built their own manned observation submarine, Pioneer 1.

Neither proved particularly profitable. Disposing of the pipeline division and getting the company out of bankruptcy took almost three years. Culbertson liquidated the division in Singapore and concentrated on Martech’s core business of diving and ROV services, mostly in the Gulf but also in Alaska, where they dominated the market, and in California. By then, however, for lack of capital, they had lost their lead in ROVs.

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[Compressor]

Thank you @Oceanaut .

 

[Akimbo]

"Tight lipped" is an understatement. The Hydro Products RCV was developed for the US Navy, which explains the small size -- they really did fly out of a submarine's torpedo tube. I went through a basic RCV training course at Hydro Products in San Diego's Sorrento Valley. They had this really cool "head gear" with gyros to sense head movement and a small B&W TV screen in front of they eyes. The operator wearing this contraption would move their head, left or right and up and down, and the RCV would mimic the movement and therefore where the TV camera pointed.

This thing was huge by today's standards because flat video displays were were still decades in the future and gyros were each about 3.5"/890mm in diameter. Wires protruded everywhere and was delicate at best, As primitive a it was, it was still so good that they had to seatbelt the operator into their chair. They would get so engrossed in the task that they would stand up and try to walk around to get better view of the job -- not a great idea on the confines of a submarine.

The "high res" black and white TV system had a super-sharp 600 lines of resolution. That is less than half of what low-end televisions run today. Seaway Diving paid about $250,000 in 1973 for the basic system without the deployment cage. It didn't take long for the oilfield industry to figure out that a much more rugged and powerful ROV with capable manipulators was more important than the RCV's diminutive size.

Hydro Products dominated the market for deep water underwater television systems, high capacity 35mm and 70mm still cameras, and lighting in that era. They started building equipment for the scientific market, motivated by their close proximity to Scripps Institution. Their gear was all over the Navy's Bathyscaphe Trieste II, Sea Labs, large CURV (Cable-controlled Undersea Recovery Vehicle) ROV, and both Deep Dive Systems (Mark I and Mark II).

 

[Akimbo]

Here's an image of RCVs just before delivery to Taylor Diving & Salvage.
http://ocean-innovations.net/OceanInnovationsNEW/Resources/120-135 SD Marine Technology.pdf

 

[sageGrouse]

I put together a brief history of Hydro Products for anyone interested.
A Brief History of Hydro Products
Since it's not really about diving, and more about the business, I wasn't sure it fit here. But If anyone is interested in 1960's - 1970's submersible and ROV history, I can post some photos and things here that my dad saved (he worked for Hydro Products).

 

[Akimbo]

Since it's not really about diving, and more about the business, I wasn't sure it fit here. But If anyone is interested in 1960's - 1970's submersible and ROV history, I can post some photos and things here that my dad saved (he worked for Hydro Products).

Count me as interested.

 

[BoundForElsewhere]

Count me in.

 

[Oceanaut]

Thank you. There's a good deal of interesting stuff here. I did not know about the ROV to look inside the torpedo tubes of the sunken USS Scorpion, nor the Anthro, which must have been well before its time.

 

[sageGrouse]

List of RCV units in March 1983