51 “Buddy and Jigger went through a customer-discovery process early on with some local stakeholders, including environmental groups like Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute [WHOI], to understand what prospective USV customers were trying to do: what data they were trying to collect and what their ideal USV platform would look like,” says Hobie Boeschenstein, director of business development and operations at SeaTrac. “Based on those discussions, they agreed on a reasonably simple configuration for a sensibly sized USV, with solar panels recharging a battery pack to store up energy and power an electric propulsion motor, not just for sustainability but because they knew that making something work consistently on the ocean is hard, and you can’t build simplicity into something that was complicated from the outset. “You need a platform that enters life as simple in order to keep it simple later on, by minimising things like moving parts that can break, subsystems that require huge expertise or training from users, or components that are difficult to maintain.” Seven years on from the start of r&d, the two friends’ SP-48 USV is in use by researchers at WHOI, NOAA, Princeton University and other leading research bodies across the US, with a range of potential customers in the commercial and military space also evaluating the use of this unit in the near future. Design evolution Herman and Duncan first began thinking about USV concepts in 2015, a process that naturally drew upon their education in naval architecture and experience in sailboat engineering. SeaTrac Systems was officially incorporated in 2017, and the pair rapidly began work on the first development prototype shortly afterwards, with the aforementioned goal of a simple, solar-recharged boat in a small form factor that could be transported by shipping container to different areas. By 2018, the first prototype had been built in a garage (with the founders helped by their children) with hand assembly and sanding. That went through two years of operations with WHOI, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, and other groups, to identify what could be improved. The concept for the SP-48 soon followed, slightly larger than the first prototype, to facilitate higher solarpower generation (and enabling more payload capacity). It was also longer and had hydrodynamic optimisations, which meant that as well as generating more solar energy, it consumed less energy as it moved due to lower drag, and it could still fit in a standard, 20 ft shipping container. “They also took into account how end-users mount their instruments,” Boeschenstein says. “The first prototype was a straight hull, with instruments bolted at the bottom, and they noticed that, whether it was an acoustic Doppler current profiler [ADCP], a sonar or profiling sondes, ocean-data survey instruments tend to have a rounded form factor, and average around 10 in in diameter.” So, the founders determined that incorporating a moon pool would be valuable for integrating such instruments, as well as submerging and retrieving them from the water. The SP-48 thus features a moon pool as the primary payload bay, with standard bolting patterns on the bottom for easy installation or removal of instruments or the fairings that enclose them, either for easier mounting or reduced drag. Another payload bay has been designed behind the moon pool for topside instruments. To ease payload integration the USV’s architecture includes three 12 V power supplies, three 24 V supplies and three 39 V connections, as well as several comms buses. The SP-48 has remained outwardly unchanged since its unveiling as a second prototype in 2020, albeit with minor incremental changes as repeated trials and missions unearthed which SeaTrac SP-48 USV | Digest Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2025 The USV is designed as a cost-effective, easily manufactured survey tool, and it is used today by WHOI, NOAA, Princeton University and other leading research bodies across the US You need a platform that enters life as simple in order to keep it simple later on, by minimising things like moving parts that can break
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