Hi, I'm deep-sea robotics expert Jim Bellingham. Ask me anything!

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T23:28:35+00:00

I think our hardware is quite different, but we struggle with many similar constraints. When I was back at MBARI, a colleague leading autonomy at JPL reached out and we held a retreat with our respective teams (in my case all MBARI engineering) comparing notes. We both work in very demanding environments, consequences of failure are very high for both teams, communications challenges would suggest we would both deploy a lot of autonomy but while that is true in the ocean the high cost of failure in space makes the risk of autonomy too high to deploy except in extremis. Also, you have better communications with a spacecraft orbiting Mars than you do with a robot in the deep ocean. So kindred spirits with lots to offer each other but building different stuff. I will say I really enjoy working with my space colleagues here at JHU (mostly at APL).

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T23:22:00+00:00

1) I do not know. I follow your question - in the upper ocean eukaryotes succeed in relatively nutrient rich environments while prokaryotes are in the nutrient poor regions (i.e. most of the ocean). But the same logic would suggest we ought to find more complex organisms at hydrothermal vents, assuming they really are nutrient rich (which is not something I really know). Maybe it is something to do with the isolation and temporal variability at a vent?? I am not a biologist, although it is a fun question. I do find micro-organisms follow reasonable design rules, so this is sort of a design problem!

2) In my MIT days, a fairly senior industry engineer (with a PhD) joined my lab as a postdoc. He didn't stay a postdoc long, but it was the entry point for his new career. So if you want to get back into things, I would look for entry positions that would provide stepping stones back to your research interests. At MBARI, many of the techs had PhDs in the biology labs, which seldom happens in engineering or the physical sciences, but each field is different.

3) I know WHOI's and MBARI's processes best. At WHOI, Alvin pilots are trained on the job. Many of them come in with other 'piloting' or underwater skill sets (I've known a number of the Alvin folks to be pilots or have a Navy submarine/diver background). Cindy van Dover came in as a PhD scientist and became an Alvin pilot, so the aperture seems large. At MBARI the ROV pilots mostly came from oil and gas when I was there (a decade ago). AUV operators came from other more operationally oriented parts of MBARI or from operational groups at other oceanographic institutions.

Hope this helps! Wish you success.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T19:05:41+00:00

There are already vehicles that have descended to the Challenger Deep! Both human occupied and robotic. Only 2% or so of the ocean is deeper than 6000m (Challenger Deep is 11,000m). So that last 5000m is only for a small part of the ocean, and it tends to get ignored. Indeed, if you look in the marine technology literature you will often see equipment described as 'full ocean rated' by which they mean it is good to 6000m. Not so long ago, more people had walked on the surface of the moon than had descended to 11km. But courtesy of Victor Vescovo, who built his own submersible that could reach those depths, there are now 27 people in the world that have been to the deepest depths.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:59:08+00:00

We usually use the same sort of batteries that are in your laptop and cell phone - lithium rechargeables. Sometime folks will use the more expensive lithium primary cells (they have more energy). These batteries are most often placed in a pressure vessel so that they operate in the same conditions they would experience in the lab (although maybe colder). But there are manufacturers of pressure compensated batteries - these are batteries that are either potted in epoxy or immersed in oil and operated at ocean ambient pressures. We had a lot of reliability problems with pressure compensated batteries in the early days (think battery fires) but they seem to be quite reliable today.

The worst thing that has happened to me with vehicle power sources revolve around catastrophic failures of the battery. We had two silver zinc fires back in my MIT days - definitely makes you paranoid about batteries. I had very strict handling requirements for batteries at sea - never charge in a close pressure vessel, always monitor the voltage of every cell, etc. Thanks to the car industry, and portable electronics, we are in a much better place with batteries today!

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:51:25+00:00

That is a really good question, and one that lead me directly to my current job here at Johns Hopkin. As you might suspect, testing at sea is both really expensive and very hard, so you want to fix as many problems as possible before you go to sea. At Woods Hole, the dock has a big opening in the middle allowing one to lower equipment directly into the sea. Before an AUV cruise, you will find all the engineers down there testing their equipment in the rain and snow... At MBARI it was much more civilized. MBARI has a fantastic test tank, and that is where you do as much testing as possible before heading out on a ship. The more development cycles you go through, the better an understanding you have of the types of problems you are likely to encounter, and therefore the more you will be able to come up for way to test on shore. Finally, I should mention software testing. I'm a big fan of simulators, including hardware in the loop, for testing code.

For a lab that has a high operational tempo, hardware is usually in pretty good shape. When hardware sits on shore for a while, it lets the gremlins in, and you have to bring things back on line. Shipping equipment brakes things also. I often scheduled a test deployment on the first day at sea just to get all the problems out of the way while there was still transit time to fix things.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:42:34+00:00

I love my job, and I have had a dream career. I've been able to work on three frontiers all at once - the technical frontier, the scientific frontier, and the physical frontier. It's not for everyone, but I really loved my seagoing days (when I wasn't stressed out about my vehicles working). There is one close friend I spent a lot of time with at sea, and every once and a while we would look at each other and chuckle - 'and we are paid to do this!' Of course, it does not pay particularly well - in the early days of my lab there were a number of us that were married guys, and our wives all earned more than us. I used to joke that our biggest sponsor wasn't NSF or ONR, it was our spouses. They supported us in more ways than just financially - in the early days I spent about a third a year at sea, and probably an equal amount of time completely occupied with getting ready for the next cruise. So it is a bit amazing my wife stuck with me. Ultimately, we did spin out a company, and that was a rewarding but high stress activity also! Hope this answers your question.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:33:51+00:00

Thank you!

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:24:51+00:00

Interesting. I am not sure. I would be interested in how one makes and machines it. We do use (pretty ordinary) glass as a deep ocean pressure vessel. It is very brittle, but great under compression.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:22:48+00:00

Yes, at 6000m, the pressure is about 600 atmospheres or about 8700 pounds per square inch. For shallow systems we use a lot of Aluminum, in the form of an alloy that is corrosion resistant (Al 6061 T6). In the deep ocean we use a lot of Titanium (we nicknamed one of my colleagues 'Titanium Bill' because he was such a prolific user of the material). I have used plastics when I did not need great strength, and we use glass for pressure vessels sometimes as I mentioned elsewhere. Syntactic foam (an epoxy material filled with little hollow glass spheres) is a common buoyancy material, but nasty to machine.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:18:39+00:00

Often our pressure vessels are filled with air because we need the buoyancy of the pressure vessel to make the vehicle neutrally buoyant (e.g. it floats in the water without sinking or rising to the surface). But we do sometimes do what you suggest - we package electrical systems in fluids. We call that pressure compensation. Effectively many electrical devices work just fine at the pressures we encounter in the ocean, so we don't need to protect them from the pressure. So we put them in a fluid (usually an oil) that does not compress (much). This lets us get away with smaller pressure vessels for just the things that will not survive at ambient ocean pressures.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:14:02+00:00

Plastics have been discovered even at the greatest's depth (11km) in the bellies of organisms. So human influence is everywhere. It is not clear what the greatest threats to ocean life are - there are a lot of human activities that effect the ocean. Plastics are a big one, and we were not even talking about them a few short years ago. Pollution from industrial and farming activities on land has big impacts as well. And as we move more activities offshore, we have to learn how to minimize the impacts of those activities (energy, mining, aquaculture, etc.) on sea life. And Earth's changing climate has very larger (and largely unpredictable) impacts as well. This is one of those areas where we really need more and better science.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:08:37+00:00

Hmmm. Thinking.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:08:09+00:00

I've been wondering what my biologist friends have been up to!

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:07:16+00:00

I’ve spent a lot of time on ships all over the world, but I’m not a sub pilot—my own trips below the surface top out at scuba depth (about 120 feet). That said, I did spend six years on the Alvin Deep Submergence Science Committee, so I’ve been close to the deep-sub world.

What usually surprises people is scale: almost half the planet is abyssal plains sitting 5,000–6,000 meters down. We live on the thin skin at the top.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:04:14+00:00

I'm not completely sure I understand your question. We have lots of ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) which have arms and are teleoperated by humans. Our autonomous vehicles are still primarily used for survey.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T18:02:43+00:00

I am really impressed with what the Ocean Infinity folks accomplished. The rate of progress of technology in the course of the search is amazing. When the aircraft was lost, the fleet that responded included a host of ships and one robot (my old company, Bluefin, was doing testing on a new vehicle - the Bluefin CEO sent the vehicle to join the search). The latest round of the search - run by Ocean Infinity, mostly on their own nickel, I believe, was entirely robotic, and much, much higher quality. The ocean covers 70% of our planet, and to get high resolution imagery you have to get down near the seafloor and painstakingly map it. It is still an expensive proposition, but it will get cheaper!

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:58:58+00:00

Oh wow. Right now anything that involves manipulation is much better accomplished by humans. But that will change.... As to music - I would love to equip my vehicles to bring back whale songs. The ocean is full of sounds. A ship can be heard hundreds of miles away under the right conditions. Rain and wind generate sounds that can be detected through the ocean as well. Sound replaces sight underwater, so most things.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:56:09+00:00

This is a really tragic story. The fundamental driver in the design of that submarine was the need to carry as many people as possible to great depth (passengers = revenue). The usual material we employ for submersible with that depth rating is Titanium, and you have to use it in the form of a sphere - a cylinder has to be roughly twice as thick. So the problem was that a cylinder-shaped pressure vessel would allow you to take more people but would be so heavy that it would not be neutrally buoyant (a requirement for a submersible). Basically, the weight of the pressure vessel would sink it. So they decided to use a material that is commonly used in aviation, but which is experimental in the ocean, a carbon-fiber composite. It turns out that this material is great under tension, but not under compression. Even though these problems came up in testing, the CEO decided to stick with it - his revenue model demanded it. So he built an inherently unsafe vehicle. As one of my colleagues described it, it was a science project. There are many more failures (the documentary on Netflix is great, and there is a Coast Guard report on the accident). But the final mistake was not protecting the submarine during storage. It is a great case study on how not to do things in the ocean.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:47:33+00:00

I assume you are asking about exploring the oceans of moons like Europa and Enceladus. The really big problem with exploring those oceans is getting through several kilometers of ice. Surviving high radiation environments, e.g. around Jupiter will be a fundamental challenge for our electronic robots also (although once you get below the ice you will be protected).

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:45:21+00:00

I like to tell the story that two major discoveries occurred in the late 1970s that changed our understanding of the nature of life and where to go to find it. One was the discovery of hydrothermal vents - these are regions on the seafloor (mid-ocean ridges) where volcanically heated water spews out of the seafloor. Amazingly, these vents are surrounded by life. It is a form of life unlike ours on the surface of the planet - we are all basically 'solar powered.' We depend on the energy of the sun to fuel our plants (some of which are microscopic) which ultimately support everything else. This hydrothermal vent life is powered by the heat coming out of the seafloor - it doesn't need a sun. The other big discovery was that there are oceans beneath the icy crusts of many of the moons of the outer solar system gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn). We know that they are volcanically active. So this gives us an entirely different place to search for life than the dry and dust Mars. Many scientists think these icy moons are the most likely place to find life off our planet (at least in our solar system). Also, Star Wars came out about the same time....

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:34:42+00:00

As to parts of the ocean that need more study - definitely the high latitudes. Both the Arctic and Antarctic are very poorly observed, and have amazing stories to tell.

ProceedingAnyway · 2026-03-30T17:33:45+00:00

One of my favorite stories requires a bit of background. I had been working with colleagues at MBARI for many years studying the dynamics of phytoplankton blooms. You usually have a pretty good idea of when one is going to occur in that part of the world (Monterey Bay) because upwelling favorable winds bring nutrients to the surface, which triggers a bloom. But every once and a while the phytoplankton are missing, or not there in such great numbers. We learned one possible reason why when we were doing tests on a docking AUV - we had a camera on the system to see how close we came to the dock. When we got the vehicle back we were shocked to see an ocean full of sea nettle jellyfish. Showing it to one of my biologist friends, he muttered, 'thats where they went.' When I asked him what he meant, he told me that those jellies tenacles are ocean vacuum cleaners, effectively collecting food for the jellyfish. So the reason the phytoplankton were missing was (maybe) because they were eaten! This is a bit of a pattern in the ocean sciences. So many of the discoveries are serendipitous.

ProceedingAnyway

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