Autonomous Sea Platforms

Happy Wednesday everyone! Welcome to the Autonomous Platforms of the Future Newsletter, designed to inform you about future game changing products, technologies, and platforms. This week I'll be focusing on highlighting Autonomous Sea Platforms and some key contributions they make.

I'll also be featuring a major startup that is changing the autonomous landscape for commercial marine and boating industry users. I'm excited to dive deep into this space as its not discussed as heavily as some of the autonomous aircraft and land vehicles.

Let me provide you a executive level overview of autonomous sea platforms and why they are important to future societies.

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is an unmanned underwater robot that is capable of independently completing a pre-programmed mission.

These autonomous platforms provide access to areas that may otherwise not be explored and act as force multipliers, allowing one ship to research a greater area that wouldn’t have been possible before.

It is well known that currently only 5% of the ocean has been explored by man. Why is it that 95% of the ocean gone unexplored?

1. It is difficult to see in deep water. The so-called sunlight zone ends at about 200 meters below the ocean surface, making imaging much trickier while the extreme pressures put a toll on things.

2. At great ocean depths, exploration conditions become extreme for humans.

The perfect solution to the problem of extreme deep ocean conditions is AUVs.

Commercial/Research applications:

• Seafloor mapping

• Ocean surveys of subsea building sites

• Monitor ocean reef life organisms and fish species for environment changes

• Ocean crash investigations

Military applications:

• Intelligence, survey, and reconnaissance (ISR)

• Mine countermeasures (MCM)

• Decoy

• Payload delivery

• Time-critical strikes

• Anti-submarine warfare

• Communication/navigation network nodes

As with autonomous air platforms, autonomy will be key in ensuring the vehicles can perform the necessary missions and make decisions on its own. This will enable AUVs to perform in swarms as the technology improves to communicate either other AUVs, surface vessels, aircraft, and other assets - while performing much longer missions.

I'd like to bring to your attention a great startup company that's making waves in the Autonomous sea platform industry. Keep an eye on them for those that are in the Private equity and Venture Capital space. If I were CEO, I'd heavily invest in their technology and upcoming products.

Now lets discuss in more detail Sea Machine Robotics.

Sea Machines Robotics builds autonomous control and navigation systems for the commercial marine and boating industries. It develops advanced control systems for boats and ships, and specialized unmanned surface vessels to enhance operational safety and productivity on the water.

Sea Machines Robotics builds RC NXT, an autonomous control and remote command system for PLC-based wireless control of vessel in existing or new build marine vessels, such as work boats, tugs, and launches; and DP-NXT autonomous control system that upgrades traditional manually piloted vessels to be operated with a reduced or zero on-board crew. It offers solutions for various unmanned applications, such as unmanned bathymetric survey vessels, AUV-tender, unmanned visual inspection of subsea assets, mobile unmanned passive acoustic monitoring, and dual towing.

Michael G. Johnson founded Sea Machines Robotics on January 4, 2014. It has its headquarters in Boston in Massachusetts.

Sea Machines Robotics has raised a total of $58.4M in funding over 11 rounds since 2015. The latest venture investment round concluded earlier this month (2/6/2024) and raised $12M.

Company revenue is estimated between $1M to 10M.

Backed by leading investors such as Toyota Ventures, Huntington Ingalls, Brunswick Corporation, Accomplice, and Dolby Fund, Sea Machines Robotics is primed to take a huge step forward for growth in the coming years. Since 2019, the company became one of the world’s only autonomy companies serving vehicles weighing over one ton with products on the market.

For even more information about this company's products, check out their website below.

AUVs are gaining more and more traction within commercial and military use cases. As evidenced by the US Navy's order of five Boeing Orca Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUV), the first acquisition of unmanned submarines with combat capability. Another shameless plug for Boeing in that it delivered the first Orca Extra Large Uncrewed Undersea Vehicle (XLUUV) to the U.S Navy following acceptance testing earlier this month.

I'm excited to see where the future goes for commercial applications as more companies find beneficial uses for these vehicles. Think even underwater habits for humans in the future.

Thanks for joining me this week. Stay tuned for my next technology talk by subscribing below.

If you'd like to collaborate with me on future technology opportunities, use my calendly link to book a time. Hope you have a great start to your week