More recently REMUS vehicles have been manufactured by the spinoff company Hydroid Inc, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Kongsberg Maritime.
[2] The series are designed to be low cost, they have shared control software and electronic subsystems and can be operated from a laptop computer.
[3] They are used by civilians for seafloor mapping, underwater surveying, and search and recovery as well as by several navies for mine countermeasures missions.
The largest model is the REMUS 6000 at 3.84 metres (12.6 ft) long and 71 centimetres (28 in) in diameter; it is named after its maximum diving depth of 6000m.
It has a battery endurance of up to 110 hours and a range of up to 275 nmi (509 km), depending on installed modules, and a sprint speed of 8 knots (15 km/h).
[9][10] The Mk 18 Mod 2 is equipped with side-scan sonar, a downward-looking video camera, ADCP, GPS, beam attenuation meter (BAM) to measure turbidity, and a conductivity temperature depth (CTD) sensor.
[13] It is designed for mine countermeasures, search and recovery, rapid environmental assessment, hydrographic survey, anti-submarine warfare, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
[26] The University of Hawaii at Manoa operates a REMUS 100 equipped to measure salinity, temperature, currents, bathymetry and water quality parameters.
[27] In 2017 a REMUS 6000 operated from the billionaire Paul Allen’s research vessel R/V Petrel helped discover the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) at 5,500m in the Philippine Sea.
[29] In 2019 researchers at the University of Exeter used a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution owned REMUS 100 based SharkCam off the coast of Coll and Tiree to study basking sharks.