Unema’s Underwater Robotics Engineering Career

It was an exciting break for Unema, a Washington state native who had grown up tinkering with electronics and exploring the outdoors. Unema joined the team in early 2016 and has since contributed to the development and operation of deep-sea robots for scientific expeditions around the world.

GFOE’s contract with NOAA expired in July, forcing the engineering team to disband. But soon after, Unema teamed up with four former colleagues to start their own ROV consultancy, called Deep Exploration Solutions, to continue the work he was so passionate about.

“I love exploring and seeing new things every day,” he says. “And the engineering challenges that come with it are really exciting, because there’s a lot of pressure there and a lot of technical problems to solve.”

Nature and technology

Unema’s fascination with electronics began very early. Growing up in Lynden, Washington, he took apart radios, modified headphones, and hacked USB chargers from AA batteries. “I always had to know how things worked,” he says. He was also a Boy Scout and spent much of his youth hiking, camping, and snowboarding.

This love of both technology and nature can be traced, at least in part, to his parents: his father was a civil engineer and his mother was a high school biology teacher. But another major influence growing up was Kredit, the science teacher who recruited him. (Kredit was also a colleague of Unema’s mother.)

Kredit has won numerous awards for his work as an educator, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching in 2004. Like Unema, he also shares a love for the outdoors as the longest-serving Yellowstone National Park ranger. “He was an excellent science teacher, very inspiring,” says Unema.

When Unema graduated from high school in 2010, he decided to enroll at his father’s alma mater, Michigan Technological University, to study engineering. At first, not knowing which discipline to follow, he enrolled in the general engineering course, but he quickly turned to electrical engineering.

A summer internship at a steel mill run by the multinational company ArcelorMittal introduced Unema to industrial automation and assembly lines. After graduating in 2014, he took a job with Gentex Corp. in Zeeland, Michigan, where he worked on manufacturing systems and industrial robotics.

Dive into underwater robotics

In late 2015, he received a call from Kredit asking if he would be interested in working on underwater robots for GFOE. The role involved not only engineering these systems, but also piloting them. Getting started was a difficult choice, says Unema, because he had just been promoted at Gentex. But the promise of the trip, combined with the new technical challenges, made it too good an opportunity to turn down.

Building technology that can withstand the overwhelming pressure on the ocean floor is a difficult task, he says, and there are tradeoffs between weight, size and cost. Everything must be waterproof and electronic devices must be carefully insulated to prevent them from washing up on the ocean floor. Some components are pressure tolerant, but most must be stored in titanium vials under pressure. Components must therefore be extremely small to minimize the size of the metal housing.

Unema carries out pre-dive checks from the Okeanos Explorer control room. Once the ROV is launched, scientists will watch images from the cameras and tell their team where to direct the vehicle.Art Howard

“You work closely with the mechanical engineer to install the electronics in a very small space,” he explains. “The smaller the cylinder, the less expensive it is, but also the less mass on the vehicle. Each element of mass means you need more buoyancy, so you want to keep things small, keep things light.”

Communications is another challenge. ROVs rely on several kilometers of cable containing just three single-mode optical fibers. “All communications must be grouped together and run through a single cable,” explains Unema. “And every year, new instruments consume more data. »

He works exclusively on custom-built ROVs for scientific research, which require smoother control and significantly more electronics and instrumentation than the heavier vehicles used by the oil and gas industry. “The scientific ones are all hand-built, they’re all original,” he says.

Unema’s role covers the entire life cycle of design, construction and operation of an ROV. He mainly spends his winters improving and maintaining the vehicles and his summers piloting them on expeditions. At GFOE he primarily worked on two ROVs for NOAA called Deep Discoverer And Seirioswho operate from the ship Okeanos Explorer. But he has also flown ROVs for other organizations over the years, including the Schmidt Ocean Institute and the Ocean Exploration Trust.

Unema’s new consultancy, Deep Exploration Solutions, has won a contract to perform winter maintenance on NOAA ROVs, and the company is now seeking other ROV design and upgrade work, as well as piloting work.

The life of an engineer at sea

During expeditions, Unema is responsible for driving the robot. It follows the instructions of a scientific team who watches the video feed from the ROV to identify features such as corals, sponges or deep-sea creatures that they would like to study in more detail. Sometimes it will also operate hydraulic arms to collect particularly interesting finds.

In general, missions aim to discover new species and map the distribution area of ​​known species, explains Unema. “There’s a lot of the ocean floor that we don’t know about,” he says. “Basically, with every expedition, there are new species.”

This involves being at sea for weeks at a time. Unema says life on ships can be difficult: many new crew members get seasick, and you spend almost a month living closely with people you’ve often never met before. But he appreciates the opportunity to meet colleagues from a wide variety of backgrounds, all of whom are deeply enthusiastic about the mission.

“It’s like when you go to scout camp or summer camp,” he said. “You all meet new people. Everyone is really excited to be here. We don’t know what we’re going to find.”

Unema also enjoys the challenge of solving engineering problems with the limited resources available on the ship. “We’re going to the middle of the Pacific,” he said. “Things break and you have to fix them with what you have.”

If this sounds more exciting than intimidating and you want to work with ROVs, Unema’s main advice is to talk to engineers in the field. It’s a small but friendly community, he says, so just do your research to see what opportunities are available. Some groups, such as the Ocean Exploration Trust, also offer internships to students to help them gain experience in the field.

And Unema says there are very few similar careers. “I love it because I get to do all aspects of engineering, from idea to operations,” he says. “Being able to take something I’ve worked on and use it in the field is really rewarding. »

This article appears in the December 2025 print issue under the title “Levi Unema”.