"Bzzt! XCT-45T Reports All Secure! Bzzt!"

At the bottom of this story regarding the Navy's R&D into firefighting robots, was a mention that the Navy would like robots to stand Sounding and Security watches.

Ultimately, the Navy wants a more advanced version of the robot to patrol ships and look for corrosion, pools of water and overheated equipment and respond to them, [Thomas McKenna, the Office of Naval Research's program manager for human-robot interaction and cognitive neuroscience] said.

"Our vision is that the humanoids would be a roving watch that are walking around the ship, doing inspections, looking for things that are out of the ordinary," he said.

Sounding and Security was an in-port watch that was stood by an engineer, usually from A-Gang. The watchstander recorded the data from equipment which ran in port, typically the AC units and the air dehydrators. The watchstander had a list of voids that had to be sounded with a plumb-bob tape to check the water level.

A hyper-diligent Duty Engineer would occasionally make a round with the Sounding and Security watch to check the readings for himself and make sure that the watchstanders weren't gundecking* the readings. Few Duty Engineers were that vigilant.

I don't recall that manning the Sounding and Security watch put any great strain on the engineers. But things might be different, now, in an era of undermanned warships, especially those that were designed that way.
___________________________________________
* An ancient naval term for falsifying or forging a log or a report.