Ocean Robots Upgraded After Logging 300,000 Miles

kkleiner writes "Liquid Robotics first generation of wave gliders have successfully navigated from the U.S. to Australia, surviving numerous hurricanes. Now, the next generation of autonomous robots have been outfitted with thrusters that supplement the wave-energy harvesting technology that they use to move. They also are equipped with a weather station and sensors to collect even more data on the ocean. Currently, over 100 missions are in operation around the world."

Comments

First wave!

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted by Autonomous Coward!

Obama's hitlist grows

[Comboman]

The White House will not confirm whether these unmanned underwater drones are being used to take out Atlantian terrorists.

Re:Obama's hitlist grows

[Sarten-X]

The Atlantean government, as usual, could not be reached for comment.

Re:Obama's hitlist grows

[CannonballHead]

They're too busy worrying about their financials. All their mortgages are under water.

They just had a new round of funding

[TubeSteak]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512701/ocean-faring-robot-cashes-in-on-offshore-oil-and-gas/

The Silicon Valley-based company yesterday [March 19, 2013] raised $45 million in a series E round to grow the companyâ(TM)s sales and services around what it calls âoehigh-value ocean data servicesâ in research, defense, and oil and gas exploration.

They seem to have a really good thing going and I'm glad the recession hasn't crippled their business.

Jupiterfoundation - spinoff research

[sackbut]

They also do some very interesting projects with the Waveriders and with cetacean (whale) research at the Jupiterfoundation.org. You can listen live to whale sounds coming from Hawaii http://www.jupiterfoundation.org/new_bw_liveaudio_hawaii.html. The Waveridrers were actually a spinoff from the original Jupiter Foundation.

International Smuggling

[stevegee58]

Imagine being able to deliver guns, drugs and other contraband using these things. Just beach it at pre-arranged GPS coordinates on some remote shore and the recipient can pick it up.

A lesson for space robotics

[khallow]

A private company receives somewhere less than $90 million in funding (half which was received last month) and manages to create a new type of cheap sea-based platform and currently has over a hundred of them active.

In contrast, the typical space probe is a hideously expensive, one-off design made by people who have no interest in reducing the cost of the platform. In the past, I've advocated developing space probes in batches or iterative generations instead. This is an example of why.

There are some obvious differences. Space is much more expensive to access at $5-10k per kg just to reach low Earth orbit. While these guys can just drive up to a beach. Space also is a harsher environment. It doesn't have full time exposure to sea water, but it does have hard radiation, temperature extremes, and heat dissipation issues.

Even so, this is how you do things economically. Making multiple copies of a probe design means that you spread out R&D costs over more probes - R&D is a large cost currently of space probes. You also get "learning curve" effects where the marginal cost of manufacturing, operation, and management of probes goes down as you make and deploy more of them. You "learn" (or rather exploit various economies of scale for these processes) how to do this better.

End result is more probes and more work done for the same amount of money spent.

Re:A lesson for space robotics

[necro81]

There are several additional aspects of space design that make it difficult and expensive compared to these ocean drones:

1. * Launch costs are so high that you need to make sure, damn sure, that your space probe works reliably. You don't want to a faulty $2 component to ruin a $100 million launch. Also, because launch costs are so high, you want your space probe to last for a looong time in orbit. So you test everything like mad, which costs money, and chose high-reliability components that have also been tested to death and are themselves very expensive, etc. With ocean drones, if there's a problem, you have only lost the hardware itself, not the tremendous ancillary costs as well. In all likelihood, you can probably hop on a boat and go retrieve it for a partial recovery.
2. * A launch is a rather traumatic event for any piece of equipment. To keep it from shaking itself apart, everything needs to be bolted down. Lots of satellites have parts that are folded up for launch and automagically deployed in orbit. But you also need to be able to release the payload in controlled, automated, and hands-off fashion after launch. Doing this properly requires careful design and lots more testing. An ocean drone, by contrast, can be handled as gently as you please, assembled and set up on site, and deployed by hand.
3. * Most launches have multiple payloads from multiple people as a way to share cost. As a result, unless you have demonstrated through testing that your payload isn't going to screw another customer's payload up, you can't get a launch slot. For an ocean drone, even if you are sharing a boat to get to your launch site, nothing you do is likely to screw up anyone else's mission. In many cases launching can be as simple as driving down to the pier.
4. * Some space missions do not require attitude control, orbital control, and other maneuverability. Most space missions do need that, however, and that is really tough and expensive, because you need propellants under pressure, mixing and combustion, all of which need to work in zero-g after being left idle and thermally cycled, sometimes for months or years between actuations. On the ocean, attitude control is just a matter of gravity and buoyancy, and maneuverability can be accomplished with a DC motor.

This doesn't mean that we can't get to cheaper costs through economies of scale, standardization, and learning curve effects as you suggest. But until launch costs are much much lower, the costs associated with long life, testing, and reliability will keep space a very expensive business.