Posted on August 25, 2025
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) manages hundreds of locks and dams, which are critical components of a complex navigation system that is crucial to our nation’s economy and security.
Inspecting this aging aquatic infrastructure often requires costly and dangerous processes, such as deploying divers or dewatering structures, which shuts down the flow of goods and materials.
To help USACE districts perform these inspections in a safe, cost-effective manner and with higher quality, the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) is testing the use of a commercially available underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV).
“Oftentimes the environment in which we are deploying is dangerous for a diver,” said Shea Hammond, a research biologist and lead of ERDC’s underwater ROV program. “Being a former Navy diver, former Marine Corps combat diver, I am aware of the dangers of diving. And any time you send a person into the water; there’s an inherent risk.”
With the support of ERDC’s team, deployment of the ROV allows for much safer inspection of tight, potentially dangerous areas of locks and dams without the time and great expense of shutting down the locks.
“The ROV allows us to do a pre-site inspection so we can understand what the problem is,” Hammond said. “And that then allows the dive teams to plan properly to optimize their dive time, to go directly to the root of the problem and fix the problem and get out.
“We don’t shut down shipping traffic to perform the survey, whereas if we had humans in the water, we absolutely must shut the lock down.”
ERDC researchers initially began working with this technology as a part of military project, but soon realized this capability could also be applied to solve a pressing civil works challenge.
“It was purchased to support an operation looking at underwater unexploded ordnance, but then we quickly found out after using the sonar and the laser scanning that we could inspect things,” said Justin Wilkens, a research biologist and part of the ROV team. “It also allowed us to work on the research side of things, collecting different types of data that had been previously nearly impossible to capture.”
The underwater ROV has been deployed in the Chicago Electric Dispersal Barrier to identify broken billets, without any disruption to the canal’s ship traffic, and has dived more than 80 feet down a vertical shaft in support of the Mobile District’s Holt Lock and Dam to identify a large crack inside a culvert.
Weighing just over 70 pounds, the ROV is a powerful platform, able to navigate tough currents and carry a suite of high-resolution cameras and high-fidelity sensors that can collect data in all directions.
Its muti-beam sonar allows it to navigate through murky waters. And it has a grapple arm to grab and test bolts or deploy additional tools.
During a deployment in the New Orleans Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, the ROV’s multibeam technology provided usable imagery in murky conditions with near-zero visibility. This allowed engineers to diagnose and address the cause of a gate valve malfunction.
Prior to using the ROV, the New Orleans District had unsuccessfully tried other methods and was considering the need to de-water a canal that enables the passage of more than $4 million of commodities each day.
The ROV has also been deployed to document the environmental conditions in and around ongoing dredging operations.
Using the rover in combination with technology in the mobile command center, ERDC’s team of experts can conduct on-site surveys while also broadcasting the inspection in real-time to district engineers anywhere in the world.
“There is a big opportunity here to provide really great deliverables to the district or division to help them understand their projects better, whether it be a lock in a dam or monitoring around a dredging operation or looking at seagrasses or whatever the case may be,” Wilkens said. “With this technology, there is an opportunity to gather a lot of data that people have always kind of been scratching their heads and wondering, is it really like that, is the estimate correct?”
By conducting research into how to best use this off-the-shelf-technology for underwater inspections, the team can test, validate and develop systematic approaches. Their insight will help districts know what works and what doesn’t and enable them to fully capitalize on the potential of ROVs for underwater inspections.
“One of the great powers of ERDC is the fact we do have such interdisciplinary teams,” Hammond said. “We have folks that are experts in operating in the environment. We have engineers, those who are experts in and help to develop backend networks or software. We have experts in AI and autonomy. We have experts in sensors and how we view and see the world.”
Brandon McGrew lowers the underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) down into a testing pond at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Andrew Steen (far right) and Brandon McGrew control the underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from a custom command trailer.
The underwater rover’s command screen provides critical information of its’ surroundings using a series of high-resolution cameras and high-fidelity sensors.
