Mechanical Engineer - A mechanical engineer or MechE (pronounced mek-e) is responsible for selecting the materials, designing the structure, drawing a 3-D model, optimizing the design, and minimizing the cost. A good deal of time is spent analyzing the design in the digital 3-D world to ensure that the vehicle will work exactly as planned. The MechE will need to be familiar with the concepts of structural analysis, fluid flow, material science, machining techniques, aerodynamics, and the ocean environment.

Mechanical Engineer - The MechE will be responsible for designing a housing that is capable of keeping the water out of the motor at whatever depth the vehicle is designed to operate at, while allowing a shaft to protrude from the housing and rotate the prop.

Ocean Engineer - The ocean engineer is responsible for understanding the properties of the ocean at the depth of interest. This person also works with or in place of the MechE in choosing materials and designing components to work in the harsh ocean environment.

Electrical Engineer - The electrical engineer or EE will design the entire control system for an underwater vehicle. He or she will use switches, resistors, diodes, capacitors, and circuit boards to make it possible to push a button and have the vehicle go in the desired direction. The EE is also responsible for designing the battery charging system and the energy delivery system, and ensuring that the proper voltage goes to the correct component at all times.

Mechanical Engineer - The MechE will design the user interface, that is, the way the switches will work. The MechE decides whether there will be one or four switches to control the forward and backward direction, and where they should be on the control housing.

Ocean Engineer - The ocean engineer will do the same thing as the MechE, but will also take into account how the ocean environment will affect the design of the control housing.

Electrical Engineer - Since the EE has designed the entire electronics package up until this point, there is no one better to decide what type of battery will best suit the needs of the vehicle. Taking into consideration how long the vehicle should run for and at what power, the EE will choose the most efficient battery to power the vehicle.

Mechanical Engineer - With the battery now selected by the EE, the MechE needs to fit the battery in the hull and figure out how much flotation is needed to offset the added weight.

Mechanical Engineer - Since the MechE designed the vehicle; they are the most knowledgeable of how much ballast and flotation it needs to either sink or float, and how much space there is available for this added material.

Ocean Engineer - With an understanding of the forces of the deep ocean, the ocean engineer will design the ballast and flotation to withstand both the forces at the surface of the ocean and the forces at depth. These include thousands of pounds of pressure and hundreds of degrees of temperature that is closer to what you find on another planet than on earth.

Marine Scientist - This is the person who will be using the vehicle and is therefore in charge of what we put onboard. If the marine scientist wants a sensor or a camera, the rest of the team needs to accommodate those needs and make sure those items fit on the vehicle.

ROV Pilot - Have you ever played a flight simulator game? This is what an ROV pilot does every day. From the safety of an onboard computer and flight control center, the pilot drives the ROV using video feedback. The only difference is that the ROV pilot's crash can cost millions of dollars, so he or she had better get it right the first time.

Communications Engineer - The communications engineer is in charge of getting information from one place to another as efficiently as possible. Have you ever watched a jumpy video feed over the Internet? These vehicles use the same technology, but have no room for jumpy video. So these people make sure that never happens.

Electrical Engineer - If they are standard sensors and do not exist in the size and shape of interest, the EE will have to build these from scratch. This can be a very challenging process as the tolerance may be a few thousands of a volt or an amp, and that is a difficult thing to accomplish in the electronics world.

Mechanical Engineer - When a force or other parameter could affect the vehicle performance, it needs to be monitored. This is up to the MechE to design and build sensors that can track the vehicles status.

Marine Scientist - When a scientist is anticipating a possible new discovery, he or she needs to design customized sensors. This involves knowing everything about the material to be detected and knowing how to interpret the data.

Computer Scientist - With all of this data entering a computer, someone has to come to the rescue to make it all make sense. The computer scientist will take voltages from the sensors, connect them to the computer, and have the computer turn arbitrary voltages into useful data.

Computer Scientist - Almost all electrical sensors measure the environment and output a small proportional electrical voltage or current; computer scientists have to make sense of all of that. They have to write a program that can turn the voltages into numbers, filter out any and all electrical noise, take into account non-linear data input, and be accurate to thousandths of a measurement. If this step has any errors, the entire project could yield incorrect results.

Marine Scientist - Marine scientists are significant users of the ROV and AUV technology. They determine what to study in our coastal waterways and depths of the ocean. Understanding fish population, habitats, water quality and seasonal variability are a few of the areas in which marine scientists would use ROV technology to assist them in data collection.

Ocean Engineer - Just like a MechE, an ocean engineer solves mechanical problems; however, unlike the MechE, the ocean engineer's specialty is applying the unforgiving parameters of the ocean environment to the mechanical design. As a result, these engineers will spend a lot of time determining what the environment actually consists of, how hot it is, and how much pressure there is.

Mechanical Engineer - Even after the vehicle is built, there is always room for improvement. The MechE will constantly analyze the success or failure of a mission, and determine what can they can improve or redesign on the vehicle to make it better. Check out some of Odyssey IV's mechanical redesigns here. {link to auv wiki, http://scripts.mit.edu/~jge/auvwiki/index.php?title=Main_Page}

Electrical Engineer - Just as the MechE knows, nothing is perfect; there is always a more efficient way to control the use of power. There will always be a better way to use a motor, camera, and battery, and it is up to the EE to constantly make sure that those systems are in use.

Computer Scientist - With some operating systems becoming outdated in less than six months, keeping a vehicle's software up to date can be a daunting task. As the MechE and the EE add parts, the computer scientist has to make sure that software can recognize those new parts and work with them. That's not as easy as it sounds. When you write your own operating system, you can't just go on the Internet and download a driver. The computer scientist has to write each and every driver and software update.

Marine Scientist - As a user of the technology, the marine scientist determines what needs improving on the vehicle so that appropriate data is collected and what new features would benefit science. The marine scientist then passes this information to one of the engineers to implement the change.

Mechanical and Ocean Engineers - Pointing the motors in the correct direction isn't as simple as it sounds. There is a balance between having the fewest number of motors for power consumption reasons, and having the most maneuverable robot possible. As a result, small changes in force vectors make a huge difference and need constant maintenance and updating so that the vehicle is running as efficiently as possible at all times.

Mechanical and Ocean Engineers - Just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean it can't exist. This is a motto of a good engineer. If you want to accomplish something that hasn't been done before (which is common for underwater exploration), it is up to these people to make the part or system that will allow this to happen.

Electrical Engineers - Again, an electrical engineer can't be daunted by the fact that a task has never been accomplished before. The EE makes the parts so that the new task can be attempted.

Communication Engineers - This is a field in underwater technology that is far from perfect. It's an evolving field, with upgrades always welcome.

Electrical Engineers - A microcontroller is a quick way to have a computer build a circuit for you. Instead of spending hours designing a perfectly efficient circuit to just try out a concept, EE's will use a microcontroller to test it out. And then if it works, they will build a circuit from scratch to accomplish the same task more efficiently.

Computer Engineers - All computers need to be programmed, so the computer engineer has to make sense of all of the data coming into the microcontroller and have it perform the desired command afterwards.

Mechanical Engineer - How fast should the vehicle go? How much energy can we spend? How much drag will there be? These are the questions of propeller design that a MechE must answer. Using their knowledge of aerodynamics and fluid properties, the MechE will build a 3-d model that can be tested and optimized to perform exactly as intended.

Marine Scientist - The marine scientists need to know the conditions of the water that is being studied in order to understand any other data they may be measuring. Different temperatures, conductivities, dissolved material contents, and pH will greatly affect the meaning of any data collected that day, so it is important to know how to measure these parameters.