Unema’s Underwater Robotics Engineering Career

It was an exciting breakthrough for Unema, a Washington state native who grew up tinkering with electronics and exploring the outdoors. Unema joined the team in early 2016 and has since helped develop and operate deep-sea robots for scientific expeditions around the world.

GFOE contract with NOAA it 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 company called Deep Intelligence Solutionsto continue the work he is so passionate about.

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

Nature and technology

Unema's passion for electronics began early. Growing up in Linden, Washington, he dismantled radiosmodified headphonesand hacked together USB AA chargers batteries. “I always needed to know how things worked,” he says. He was a boy too Scoutand spent much of his youth hiking, camping, and snowboarding.

This love of technology and nature can be attributed, at least in part, to his parents: his father was a civil engineer and his mother was a high school biology teacher. But another important person who influenced him was Credit, a science teacher who subsequently recruited him. (Credit was also a colleague of Unema's mother.)

Credit has received numerous awards for his teaching work, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching in 2004. Like Unema, he also shares a love of nature, as Yellowstone National Park longest serving park ranger. “He was an excellent science teacher, very inspiring,” Unema says.

When Unema graduated from high school in 2010, he decided to attend his father's alma mater. Michigan Technological Universitystudy engineering. At first he was not sure which discipline to follow and enrolled in a general engineering course, but quickly settled on electrical engineering.

Summer internship at a steel mill of a multinational corporation. ArcelorMittal introduced Unema at the factory automation and assembly lines. After graduating from university in 2014, he got a job at Gentex company in Zeeland, Michigan, where he worked on manufacturing systems and industrial robotics.

Diving underwater Robotics

At the end of 2015, he received a call from Kredit asking if he would like to work on underwater robots for GFOE. The role was not only to develop these systems, but also to pilot them. According to Unema, taking the plunge was a difficult choice as he had just been promoted to Gentex. But the promise of travel, coupled with new engineering challenges, made this an opportunity too good to pass up.

Building technology that can withstand crushing pressure on the ocean floor is difficult, he says, and you have to make trade-offs between weight, size and cost. Everything should be waterproofand electronics must be carefully insulated to prevent them from being grounded on the ocean floor. Some components are pressure resistant, but most must be stored under pressure. titanium flasks, so the components must be very small to minimize the size of the metal body.

Unema conducts pre-dive checks from the Okeanos Explorer control room. Once the ROV is launched, scientists will watch the camera feed and tell their team where to point the vehicle.Art Howard

“You work very closely with a mechanical engineer to fit the electronics into a really small space,” he says. “The smaller the cylinder, the cheaper it is, but the less mass the vehicle has. Every bit of mass means more buoyancy is required, so you want to keep things small so they're light.”

Connection that's another problem. ROVs use several kilometers of cable containing only three single-mode optical fibers. “All the communications have to be connected and then run through one cable,” Unema says. “And every year new tools consume more data.”

It works exclusively on ROVs specifically built for scientific research, which require smoother controls and significantly more electronics and instrumentation than the heavier vehicles used oil and gas industry. “All the scientific models are handmade, they’re all fancy,” he says.

Unema's role covers the full lifecycle of ROV design, construction and operation. He primarily spends the winters upgrading and maintaining the vehicles and the summers piloting them on expeditions. At GFOE he primarily worked on two ROVs for NOAA called Deep discoverer And Seirioswho work from the ship Oceanos Explorer. But over the years he has also piloted ROVs for other organizations, including Schmidt Ocean Institute And Ocean Exploration Foundation.

Unema's new consulting firm, Deep Exploration Solutions, has been awarded the winter maintenance contract for NOAA's ROVs, and the firm is currently seeking additional ROV design, retrofit, and pilot work.

An engineer's life at sea

During expeditions, Unema is responsible for controlling the robot. He follows the instructions of the science team, who watch the video feed from the ROV to identify things like corals, sponges or deep-sea creatures that they would like to study in more detail. Sometimes he also uses hydraulic levers to select particularly interesting finds.

In general, missions are aimed at discovering new species and mapping the range of known ones, Unema says. “There are a lot of places on the ocean floor that we don’t know anything about,” he says. “Almost every expedition new species emerge.”

This involves being at sea for weeks at a time. Unema says life on board ships can be challenging: many new crew members are seasick, and you spend nearly a month living in close contact with people you've often never met before. But he relishes the opportunity to meet colleagues from all walks of life who are very enthusiastic about their mission.

“It’s like going to scout camp or summer camp,” he says. “You're all meeting new people. Everyone's really excited to be there. We don't know what we'll find.”

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

If this sounds more exciting than scary and you're interested in working with ROVs, Unema's top tip is to talk to engineers working in the field. It's a small but friendly community, so just explore what opportunities are available, he said. Some groups, such as the Ocean Exploration Trust, also provide internships for college students to help them gain experience in the field.

And Unema says that there are very few such professions. “I love it because I get to deal with all aspects of the design, from concept to operation,” he says. “Being able to take what I've been working on and use it in the field is really rewarding.”

This article will appear in the December 2025 print issue entitled “Levi Unema.”