"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.
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* An ancient naval term for falsifying or forging a log or a report.

Planeguard

You may have seen photos of an aircraft carrier conducting flight operations with a smaller ship trailing behind. That ship was functioning as the "plane guard", a term that was often contracted to a single word: Planeguard.

The destroyer (it was usually a destroyer, but after the FRAM-DDs were all retired, it often fell to a Knox or Perry class FF) followed behind the carrier during flight operations. The job of the planeguard was to pick up the flight crew of an airplane that crashed on launch or recovery.

Planeguard was developed after the Second World War. It wasn't done during the war, likely because of the risk of a stopped escort being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The accident rate on board carriers in the early days of the jet age, especially before the angled-deck was adopted fleet-wide, was horrendous by modern standards.

The planeguard DD followed the carrier around at a distance of 500 yards. While the pilots undoubtedly liked the idea of someone coming to save their asses, having a ship with a tall radar mast so close to the stern of the carrier wasn't liked, especially when the straight-deck carriers were still in use.

The destroyers didn't much care for it, either. They didn't like that the carrier engineers didn't seem to give a shit whether or not a ship was behind them when the carrier snipes pumped bilges. Because nothing pleased the destroyers' engineers more than running contaminated water through their evaporators. The word also almost always seem to be passed on the carrier to secure flight ops and dump all trans and garbage from the fantail before the planeguard was cut loose from her station.

And there was also a concern that following too closely gave the planeguard little time to react if the carrier abruptly changed course or, worse, slowed down without signalling those changes to the planeguard. Over time, the planeguard was moved back to a thousand yards, then to a station two thousand yards off the port quarter of the carrier (2SNX) or three thousand yards (3SNX).

Planeguard sucked, especially at night. Carriers have lots of deck lighting, it was almost impossible to pick out the running and range lights, and so it was very hard to determine whether or not a carrier changed course or speed. If radar silence was ordered, then keeping track of what the carrier was doing could be very difficult.

Aircraft carriers really did had a nasty habit of changing courses and speeds in order to maintain favorable winds across their decks without notifying their escorts of that. Talk to anyone who ever stood a OOD or JOOD watch on a tin can on planeguard and they'll tell you stories. No true destroyerman liked planeguard duty. It was not uncommon for either the Captain or the XO to be on the Bridge of ships in planeguard station.

The dangers weren't theoretical. HMAS Melbourne collided with and sank two of her escorts, HMAS Voyager and USS Frank E. Evans. USS Wasp ran over USS Hobson and sank her. There were quite a few other collisions between carriers and their escorts.

The use of tin cans for planeguard largely went away for three reasons. One was that helicopters could do the job much faster. The second was that there were far fewer escorts available. An escort that had good passive sonar capability was needed far enough away to detect an enemy submarine and do something about it, rather than trying to follow a carrier without getting run over. The same logic held true for AAW missile shooters. The third reason was that the accident rate for naval aviation really decreased, especially after the mirror landing system was adopted and adjusted to.

(Yes, they do it with mirrors.)