Subsea ROV Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
Filing growth compares 2021 (759 records) with 2024 (764) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 30,075 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This landscape tracks 30,075 published patent records matching “Remotely Operated Vehicle” or “Remotely Operated Vehicles” across title, abstract, claims and description, filed between 2015 and the 2026-07-31 cut-off. The corpus spans the hardware and control systems built around ROVs used in subsea inspection, intervention and drilling support, as well as adjacent marine and naval applications that share the same vehicle and tether architecture.
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the most recent one to two years in any trend understate real activity; 2024 is the last year treated here as complete. Family-level counts are used where concentration and growth figures are quoted, since raw document counts can be inflated by continuations and parallel filings across jurisdictions.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 30,075-record corpus: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses carry the claim density today.
A decade of filing, with a 2017 peak
Filings peaked in 2017 at 1,141 and have settled lower since; the 2021-to-2024 window shows an essentially flat trajectory (759 to 764, +1%), not a decline — treat 2025 and 2026 figures as still filling in rather than evidence of a downturn.
Drilling and marine vessel classes lead
E21B (earth and rock drilling) appears on 22.6% of the 30,075 records in scope, reflecting how much ROV patent activity is tied to well operations rather than the vehicle alone; B63B marine vessels, F16L pipe fittings, and G01V geophysics follow at single-digit shares, with G01S radar/sonar/positioning the smallest of the classes tracked here at 2.7%.
Shares are the percentage of the 30,075 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Subsea Engineering: Remotely Operated Vehicle Patent Landscape with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about subsea engineering: remotely operated vehicle patent landscape and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaRepresentative filing and most-cited records
Method for controlling a fleet of autonomous/remotely operated vehicles
Assigns each of at least two vehicles a predetermined route with a road segment requiring a teleoperator's assistance, determines the time overlap between segments across the fleet, and inserts a delay or speedup in a preceding autonomous segment so the road segments requiring teleoperator involvement no longer overlap in time.US20230133577A1 — Einride AB, published 2023-05-04
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WO2014090684A1 | Robot for transporting storage bins | 1,545 |
| 2 | WO2015193278A1 | Robot for transporting storage bins | 1,515 |
| 3 | WO2018146304A1 | Rail arrangement for a storage system | 822 |
| 4 | US6056237A | Sonotube compatible unmanned aerial vehicle and system | 795 |
| 5 | US5193000A | Multiplexing technique for stereoscopic video system | 599 |
| 6 | US20050054228A1 | Mid-line connector and method for pipe-in-pipe electrical heating | 554 |
| 7 | US5039193A | Fibre optic single mode rotary joint | 453 |
| 8 | US5116759A | Reservoir chemical sensors | 427 |
| 9 | US5182641A | Composite video and graphics display for camera viewing systems in robotics and teleoperation | 426 |
| 10 | US5309140A | Feedback system for remotely operated vehicles | 387 |
Citation counts favour older filings simply because they have had more time to accumulate citations inside the searched corpus; treat them as a signal of influence, not of current technical relevance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Three read-throughs from the trend, concentration and classification figures above.
A mature field, not a shrinking one
Filing volume has been essentially flat since 2021 after peaking in 2017 at 1,141. That pattern is consistent with a technology base that has settled into incremental improvement rather than one still expanding into new claim territory.
No single assignee controls the space
The top 5 assignees combined hold only 10.4% of all records in scope, and the top 10 only 16.2%. That leaves the field open to focused challengers who can out-claim a specific sub-application rather than compete head-on with a scale filer.
Drilling-support claims dominate the map
E21B earth and rock drilling carries the largest single share of records at 22.6%, well ahead of B63B marine vessels at 7.6%. Filers positioning purely around vehicle mobility or sensing rather than well operations are competing in comparatively less crowded classes.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to subsea engineering: remotely operated vehicle patent landscape, with the prior art for and against each one.
Where to take this landscape next
The figures here describe the corpus as a whole; the next step is usually narrowing to a specific claim, class or competitor set.
Check freedom to operate against a specific claim
Concentration figures show no single assignee dominates, but that does not mean any given claim is open — a narrower search against the exact mechanism or sensor combination is the next step.
Run a claim-level search in EurekaTrack momentum by assignee over time
Recent-year momentum figures here are lagged by publication delay; a live monitor catches new filings from any of the ranked leaders as they publish.
Set up assignee monitoring in EurekaExplore the under-claimed branches directly
The gate chips above point to thinner filing density in specific sub-areas; drafting a first claim there benefits from seeing exactly what prior art already exists nearby.
Explore white space in EurekaCommon questions on ROV patent activity
The leading assignee in this corpus holds 1,157 records, well ahead of the fifth-place company at 423 and tenth place at 303. That said, the top 5 assignees combined account for only 10.4% of all 30,075 records in scope, so leadership in raw count does not translate into control of the field. The ranking includes oilfield services and subsea equipment incumbents alongside newer entrants from robotics and compute, so which company matters most depends on which application area you are checking against.
Filing peaked in 2017 at 1,141 records and has not returned to that level since. From 2021 to 2024, the last window treated as complete, volume moved from 759 to 764, a flat +1% — essentially a plateau rather than growth or decline. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that is expected: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so those years are still filling in and should not be read as a slowdown.
E21B, earth and rock drilling for wells, is the single largest IPC subclass in this corpus at 22.6% of the 30,075 records in scope, reflecting how much ROV patent activity ties back to subsea well operations rather than vehicle design alone. B63B marine vessels follows at 7.6%, with F16L pipe fittings, G01V geophysics, B63G naval vessels, B63C launching and salvaging, G01N material testing and G01S radar/sonar/positioning each carrying single-digit shares. Because a single record can carry multiple IPC classes, these shares add up to more than 100% and should not be summed.
The classification data shows filing density concentrated heavily in drilling support and marine vessel classes, leaving narrower branches like tether-free power management, acoustic-sonar positioning fusion, autonomous fleet handoff between teleoperators, and ROV-to-AUV docking comparatively under-claimed. These are not guarantees of an open field, since a broader claim elsewhere may already cover the mechanism, but they are areas where the density of directly on-point prior art is visibly thinner than in the core classes. A claim-level search against the specific mechanism is the reliable way to confirm freedom to operate before drafting.
Not very, by the standards of a mature patent field: the top 5 assignees hold 10.4% of all 30,075 records in scope, and the top 10 hold 16.2%. That leaves the large majority of records spread across a long tail of smaller filers within the 100 companies in the ranked list. For a new entrant, this means the field is unlikely to be blocked wholesale by one or two dominant players, but it also means competitive intelligence needs to track a wide set of assignees rather than a handful of household names.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.