60 Autonomously crossing the world’s great oceans is a challenging undertaking, but one made easier when uncrewed systems engineers have a large budget to work with, as the last few years have proven. But managing such stable, fault-free and persistent operations with a USV that anyone could afford is another matter altogether. The Pacific Ocean is Earth’s largest body of water, but a small number of USVs have managed to cross it, including those from Australia’s Saildrone in the west and the Boeing-Liquid Robotics Wave Glider in the east. These USVs have significantly lower prices and operating costs than traditional, crewed research vessels, which often run into hundreds of millions of US dollars per unit. As we write, a very different platform is poised to achieve its first Pacific Crossing; one that comes at a fraction of the price of its headline-grabbing counterparts – the Lightfish USV from Seasats, based in California. Given the sheer size of the ocean and the severe weather phenomena that can hammer vessels sailing it, many question whether a $200,000 USV could manage a trans-Pacific crossing. Such skepticism is precisely what motivated Seasats’ journey, which began in January when it launched one of its Lightfish USVs from the port of San Diego. As Seasats CTO Dylan Rodriguez tells us: “We advertise the Lightfish as a persistent platform, so we have to be able to demonstrate that persistence. I’ve also previously worked for some of our competitors, where we all shared the frustration of using components or seeing vehicles that couldn’t do what their makers claimed they could do. “So, internally, it has been really important to everyone here that we don’t just make claims of what Lightfish can do – we have to show it.” Max Kramers, head of vehicle design at Seasats, adds: “Our users are the kind who want to send a USV far out into the middle of the ocean to collect and stream video and hydrographic data for them, and to not have to constantly watch it for potential dangers. At the price point Rory Jackson investigates a company working to prove the Pacific Ocean can be crossed with a small, reasonably priced survey USV We know the way The Lightfish is a 3 m-long USV, built for persistent survey, recharged by solar cells and a methanol generator (All images courtesy of Seasats) April/May 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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