The Coevolution of Midwater Research and ROV Technology at MBARI

Mesobot: An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Tracking and Sampling Midwater Targets

“…While all relevant effects cannot be eliminated, they can be minimized. Over decades, midwater animals have been observed successfully from submersibles and ROVs [21] , but like all other methods, those observations are often biased.…”

New High-Tech Flexible Networks for the Monitoring of Deep-Sea Ecosystems

“…The AUV provides the highest mobility and flexibility in sampling design for mapping with impacts on the benthic habitat by maritime activities (e.g., noise, substrate disturbance at different scales, and artificial light pollution effects). Although the ROV design implies a tether, such a platform has also a high mobility and it can be used similarly to AUVs, 32 with the advantage of having two way realtime data transmission and manipulator arms to be used for management and maintenance tasks within the monitoring infrastructure (e.g., manipulative experiments or for placing autonomous recorders such as stand-alone autonomous cameras). In addition, ROVs are the best option for collecting video data on the development of the fouling community on the observatory infrastructure and fauna association with the structure.…”

Vertical Distribution Patterns of Cephalopods in the Northern Gulf of Mexico

“…Past deep-sea cephalopod inventories include work conducted using various methods such as closing-net systems as well as large, open trawl nets (Nesis, 1972(Nesis, , 1993Lu and Clarke, 1975a,b;Young, 1978;Vecchione and Pohle, 2002;Judkins et al, 2016). Recently, remotely operated vehicles have been used to collect precise observations on vertical distribution and other properties (Vecchione et al, 2001;Widder et al, 2005;Robison et al, 2017).…”