20 When Richard Dowdeswell was headhunted in 2017 to turn around the long-established but struggling Kongsberg GeoAcoustics, his knowledge of the technology at the heart of the business was more than somewhat limited. “I had no idea about sonar,” he admits. “One of my colleagues had a book on the fundamentals, which I read, and from then on it was a very steep learning curve.” However, Dowdeswell’s scientific and engineering background helped him along that curve, and he was able to draw on his experience with gas-sensing instruments at Manchester University. He used optical and then electrical instruments to measure contamination in liquids, and even ‘electronic nose’ technology that gauged the electrical properties of gases. All of this was underpinned by a deep curiosity about how things work and a habit of lifelong learning plus crucial early experience with that suddenly ubiquitous technology known as artificial intelligence (AI). Early voyages Much earlier, Dowdeswell was introduced to the sea. Although he was born in Kidderminster, a small town to the south of England’s second-largest city of Birmingham and almost as far from the coast as you can get in the British Isles, he spent three of the first five years of his life aboard ship. His father was a captain in the Merchant Navy, who lived aboard with his wife and small son while in command of 30,000 t bulk carriers on routes between the UK, Europe, Africa and the Americas. When the time came for him to start school at five, his father took a desk job in ship management in London and Dowdeswell spent most of his time in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where he attended primary and secondary school. AI-aided sonar is taking uncrewed vehicles where no hydrographic surveyor has gone before, GeoAcoustics’ co-owner tells Peter Donaldson Great expeditions June/July 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Sub-bottom profiling (left) and interferometric sonars in action. Uncrewed systems make these capabilities more accessible than when they relied on manned vessels (Image courtesy of GeoAcoustics)
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