Homebuilt ROVs Forum

I see very few hulls that are designed to be hydrodynamic. Why is that?
I'm going for an outer hull that will be somewhat hydrodynamic but foremost serve as protection for all the stuff inside (not watertight but house several wet, semi-wet and dry compartments).
Starting to question my choice...

If you don't have the need for speed I don't really see the benefit. If you plan on travelling longer distances at high speeds, sure it would be beneficial to conserve energy. Or if you plan on going really deep it could perhaps get you to the bottom quicker with less power consumption.

For most cases I would say maneuverability > speed and with a square box you can set up your thrusters to have equal maneuverability in all directions.

Welcome johzac. Yes, what Jaman42 said, but streamlined ROV would be good in strong currents. Additionally, the "wet compartments" inside the streamlined shroud contribute mass to the vehicle. This means more inertia, and more power to overcome it, and sluggish control response. Filling the spaces with syntactic foam or similar only means that you will have to add ballast, so you still end up with the same mass. This is not so much of a problem with an AUV, because the inertia has less negative effect on the AUV doing it's job. A streamlined ROV would potentially be good and very maneuverable if the amount of unused volume inside the streamlining was kept low.