Abstract To study the dynamic characteristics of remotely operated vehicle (ROV) underwater motion, a transformation matrix between the carrier coordinate system and the inertial coordinate system was established, and the rigid body dynamics model of the ROV was derived by using the Newton-Euler equation. According to the results of the ROV experimental prototype in this article, the dynamic model is simplified based on the force, motion characteristics, and structural characteristics. In the pool experiment, based on the propeller dynamic model, the least squares method was used to identify the parameters of the heading and vertical dynamic models, and through the experimental results under step control signals of different amplitudes, they were compared with the models under the same control signal. The output is subjected to error analysis. The experimental results show that the error between the theoretical value and the experimental value is small, verifying the accuracy of the ROV dynamics model established in this article.