Casey Glenn is the Electrical Engineering Lead at Oceaneering’s Offshore Products Group in Stavanger, Norway. He likes creating devices that are multi-taskers and is always trying to tweak, improve, or develop products for multiple uses on other projects.
From racecars to autonomous underwater vehicles
After graduating from Florida’s Daytona State College in 2011 with an electrical engineering degree, Casey spent 14 months traveling around the country as a race support engineer, building electronics, tuning engines, and analyzing racecar vehicle data for International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) racing teams.
He joined Oceaneering’s Houston office in 2012 as an offshore tooling technician and spent a lot of time working on rigs and vessels with fast-tracked projects. From there, he transitioned to an electrical engineering role primarily designing and building control systems for subsea dredgers, hydraulic pumping units, and well intervention systems. He also designed circuit boards, built pressure tolerant systems, and developed the software to run it all.
In 2016, Casey joined the product development team which eventually led him to Oceaneering’s Freedom™ Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) project. Pioneering a plug-and-play philosophy, the Freedom AUV is a low-maintenance, flexible subsea robotics platform that can be optimized to meet many diverse work scopes including pipeline survey, seabed survey, close visual inspection, and light intervention activities.
“We’re taking what we’ve learned on Freedom and applying it to our next-generation supervisory control hardware and software for all types of autonomous vehicles and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).”
Moving from Houston to Norway
In late 2019, Casey moved to Norway with his wife and young daughter on a long-term assignment to support the Freedom project.
“Working abroad and learning how the company operates outside of the U.S. has been an awesome opportunity—one I would highly recommend.”
Oceaneering’s engineers can often follow their work to places all over the world.
“I’ve been lucky to be involved in Freedom from the ground up. I’ve taken the product from design to development—testing it every day, learning how it operates, and how it can be improved.”
On a typical day, Casey puts the Freedom AUV in the water at Oceaneering’s “Living Lab,” in Tau, Norway, to test and expand its capabilities.
“In the beginning, the first hurdle was getting the vehicle in the water. Sea water is difficult; it’s conductive and always trying to get in where you don’t want it,” he explains. “We needed to make a rugged device capable of withstanding the pressure and intrusiveness of sea water. From the electrical side, we don’t want it to short out and damage the electronics or our batteries,” he continues.
At the test site, the vehicle can be launched and controlled from the quayside and navigated to a shore-side obstacle course that includes a subsea docking station, various pipelines, and an infrastructure designed to replicate an offshore environment.
Working in a collaborative environment
Casey notes that engineers interested in joining Oceaneering will benefit greatly from knowledge sharing.
“We are a large global company with a lot of resources. You’ll rarely find yourself at a dead end, because you can always find a subject matter expert or someone who’s worked on a similar project to answer your questions.”
There are also plenty of opportunities for growth and development.
“You have to communicate what goals you want to accomplish and where you want to go in your career. Opportunity is here for the taking. With time, patience, and effort, you can become the expert in the room on any area of interest to you.”
Finding a career that excites you
Oceaneering has allowed Casey to combine his love of travel with his desire to create products that add value. When the pandemic prevented travel back to the states for over a year, Casey and his family found a silver lining in being able to explore the Norwegian country freely without the usual crowd of tourists. He’s also picked up some of the Norwegian language but admits that his daughter has probably learned more in her kindergarten class.
His time in the field has given Casey a unique perspective.
“The first four to five years of my career, I spent up to 100 days a year offshore. When things broke, I fixed them, or I built a better component. If I can make something that will solve a problem for me down the road, I’ll do it. I’m always looking for simpler overall solutions to problems.”