Bedrock Ocean AUV | Digest strategies that match specific use cases for the body fairings, once the company’s growth justifies constructing its AUVs in high volumes (with the associated expense of making large, metallic moulds for large production runs) to reach coasts and oceans far and wide. Durability is also a critical future target. As Chiau comments: “I want to chuck these like I can with a kayak or throw them from a moving platform.” Strange new waters Bedrock’s r&d plans target continued expansion of its vehicle intelligence, by which Blue Economy companies can increasingly remove humans from data collection (with all their potential for error and injury) where AUVs can specialise, and instead place them into data analysis and response actions. “While we have achieved over-thehorizon C2 in our operations, the endgoal really is over-the-horizon launch and recovery of fleet systems. The launch and recovery bottleneck is going to be the last big hurdle that stops AUVs from being scalable,” Chiau notes. “Solving the problem of needing humans to operate an A-frame, or to carry the AUV to a drop-point, is very challenging. Some teams have tried solving it, but those are usually one-AUV-at-a-time solutions, and we need to get to a place where large numbers of these vehicles can be automatically deployed and recaptured, and then deployed repeatedly.” Beyond innovating these types of mechanisms, automation down the chain of data processing, analytics and accessibility is also on Bedrock’s roadmap, with future r&d to comprise critical targets across the ecosystem of data solutions, including AUV fleet communications technologies that could enable swarm collection, cloud-sharing and reactions to edgeprocessed ocean data. “Data will be at the core for deciding humanity’s and the environment’s future,” Chiau says. “And garbage in, garbage out. So, we want to ensure data quality, as a consistent and trustworthy source of decision-making for real impact. AI requires data, so we started there.” “We are looking at going into deeper waters as offshore construction moves in that direction, such as floating wind farms, subsea cable monitoring and mining impact assessments. Because we’ve built a modular architecture, much of our IP will work anywhere in the ocean once paired with appropriate subsystems and software. “On that note, future launch and recovery will need a surface asset of some kind. There is no reason it couldn’t be a USV of some sort we make next. That would make our data-acquisition and vehicle-handling entities into fully uncrewed systems, enabling users to point and click anywhere on Earth, and receive insights straight to their screens.” 59 Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2024 Bedrock Ocean Exploration AUV Battery-electric Positively buoyant Length: 2.4 m Diameter: 0.23 m hull (0.45 m including control surfaces) Weight in air: 60 kg in air Operating speed: 3 knots Endurance: Just over 10 hours Maximum depth: 300 m Some key suppliers Inertial navigation systems: Exail DVLs: Nortek GNSS: u-blox Forward-looking sonars: Norbit Side-scan sonars: Blueprint Subsea USBL/ACOMM: Blueprint Subsea Pressure sensors: AML Oceanographic Conductivity, temperature, depth (CTD) sensors: SonTek Magnetometers: Ocean Floor Geophysics Acoustic pingers: Sonotronics Specifications One likely route towards automated launch and recovery of the AUV could well be the development of a Bedrock Ocean Exploration USV, such as this prototype platform
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