Oceans can cover more than 70% of the earth’s surface, but we have better cards from the moon than we have the seabed. There are good reasons for that: the ocean floor is obscured and the hard environment makes it difficult to send people down to look closer. But as robots improve, we can finally get a clearer picture of the deep abyss.
There are a number of startups racing to map the ocean in more detail, but the newest that is new financing Bedrock OceanWho recently closed a Serie A-2 round of $ 25 million led by Primary and Northzone, the company told Techcrunch exclusively. Autopilot, Costanoa Ventures, Harmony Partners, Katapult and Mana Ventures took part.
Bedrock Ocean has developed an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that runs a maximum of 12 hours from its lithium ion batteries while mapping the floor using his sonar and magnetic sensors.
Traditionally, the ocean floor is mapped by large ships, which down powerful sonar pulses down in the water column. Those ships slurp fuel and require human operators, making them expensive to sail and they disturb life at sea.
“The pot at the end of the rainbow that has been haunting everyone for 20 years is, can we replace traditional ships?” Brandon Mah, co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Ocean, told Techcrunch.
The AUVs of the Bedrock Ocean are still launched from a ship, but once under water they work independently of it. Two of them can cover the same soil as one traditional mapping ship, and a 40 -feet ship can wear 10 to 12 of the AUVs, he said.
Bedrock designs and builds its own AUVs, of which Mah said it cost less than $ 1 million each. The company also developed its own software to operate the AUVs as to perform the mapping. The AUVs store data locally and perform some processing on board. When it is time to send, they come up and send the data to the ship via Wi-Fi. A Starlink antenna on board the ship can then shine that information to the cloud, where observers can keep an eye on things.
“We can confirm that the data of the quality we focus on, and identify potential goals that we want to investigate in almost real -time,” Mah said.
The Subs sail five to 10 meters above the seabed, so that the AUVs can use less powerful sonar than on ship -based mapping. Mah said that Bedrock’s sonar causes less damage to marine mammals because its frequency is outside the audible range, used less power and is used closer to the seabed, which means that the animals are less likely to swim on the path of the sonar.
Bedrock can place items on the ocean floor with an accuracy of one to two meters. That is lower than being able to deliver accuracy and surveys, and it is because the AUVs lose GPS signals after they dive. To determine their position under water, they trust inertial navigation, which is not as accurate as GPS.
Mah states that not every survey in submeter needs accuracy, but that many operations on the seabed would benefit from faster mapping. Offshore wind developers can pay in advance for a sub-meter study in advance, but when it is time to build, there may be areas where two meters of accuracy is sufficient.
The startup has spent the last two quarters on paid research work for offshore wind, oil and gas and environmental assessments. The speed of the reviews and the possibility to view the data quickly has also attracted the attention of the American navy. “We have shown that possibility,” said Mah. “They were blown away a bit.”
