Remotely (underwater) Operated Vehicle (ROV)

For an afterschool program, a few students and I are designing an underwater vehicle that will accomplish certain tasks. At first, we couldn't decide if we were going to enter the robot into a competition, or just release it in a nearby lake for fun, so we decided on both. Either way, we were invited to take a tour and get advice from the University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory (UW-APL), and they showed us some of their ROV's. The big yellow one in the middle is a glider which spends four hours going down and four hours going up in a V-shape, so there is no communication with it - they have lost quite a few. The smaller blue looking device on the left is similar to the one we are building, and there will be wire communication to a control panel outside of the water.
Just a side note: without pre-knowledge or reading this, it would be hard to decode the sentence: "We went to the UW-APL to get advice on our ROV". I find it funny how many terms have become shortened.