Issue 45 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Aug/Sept 2022 Tidewie USV Tupan | Performance monitoring | Bayonet 350 | UAVs insight | Xponential 2022 | ULPower UL350i and UL350iHPS | Elroy Air Chaparral | Gimbals | Clogworks Dark Matter

49 Vehicles. This Massachusetts-based company designs and manufactures a series of autonomous mobile robots that move around on tracks in order to navigate dry and wet sands without being disrupted by strong currents or uneven terrains. Although the company was not incorporated until March 2022, the actual crawler UGVs it now produces were originally the IP and creation of c-2 Innovations (c-2i). It so happens that c-2i’s engineers used the OpenSea software platform from Greensea Systems for their UGVs, which gradually built a relationship between the two companies until the latter offered to buy the product line of amphibious robots in order to continue their development and commercialisation. “The idea of an amphibious crawler robot was proposed and pursued as an r&d effort back in the 1980s, well before microprocessors and the internet became part of day-to-day life,” says Mike Farinella, senior engineer at Bayonet (and formerly of c-2i). “I remember from the tests of the resulting systems that onlookers received it really well, but the vast majority of the potential ‘market’ simply refused to believe something like that could possibly work. “However, the president of c-2i, Arnis Mangolds, continued fostering the development of the crawlers, and eventually won SBIR funding from the US Office of Naval Research, which had taken notice of the robots. That enabled us to develop them into a family of crawlers, the largest to date being the Bayonet 350, which is also our flagship product for US commercial and research markets as well as defence users such as the US Army Corps of Engineers.” The Bayonet 350 is a flat, wide, battery-electric vehicle that runs on two caterpillar tracks; it measures 1937 mm long, 1522 mm wide and 381 mm in height. Its typical weight is 272 kg, its maximum operating depth is 100 m, and its standard operating speed is 1.8 kph. At that speed it can run for just over 21 hours at a time (with a range slightly greater than 38 km), although the company has found ranges of 64 km or more are achievable if it runs at lower speeds, and improvements in these are anticipated when newer battery technologies are installed. Farinella says that by sitting still and directly against the seafloor, the Bayonet is perhaps the best platform available for geophysical inspections of the ocean crust, as well as detailed 3D mapping of ocean floor areas (down to 100 m below sea level, that is). “Even human divers aren’t that great for work in the shallows,” he says. “As soon as the current picks up, they can get kicked around, pulled into rocks, and there’s sometimes wildlife to be wary of. “It can be costly and hazardous, and most often the work is either done poorly or it doesn’t get done at all. You also have sensor buoys as an option, but like AUVs they aren’t necessarily great for station-keeping. Bayonet 350 | Digest Human divers are not great for work in the shallows – currents can pull them into rocks for example – so the work is often done poorly or not at all Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2022 The Bayonet 350 has been developed to survey areas from beaches to near-shore waters, tasks that most UGVs and UUVs are unsuited to