Hundreds of Floating Robots Could Soon Surveil the Oceans
September 24th, 2014Via: cNet:
Boeing and Liquid Robotics today announced a partnership to make water-borne robots that can handle a variety of surveillance jobs, ranging from hunts for submarines to the detection of drug traffickers.
Silicon Valley’s Liquid Robotics is the manufacturer of the Wave Glider SV3, a $300,000 self-powered, seafaring data center that offers customers — until now, mostly researchers and marine industry companies — tools for investigating the open seas for months at a time. SV3s have a hybrid propulsion system that can drive the robot with either solar or wave power. Boeing is the world’s second-largest defense contractor.
The new deal is aimed at augmenting Boeing’s existing maritime surveillance systems — airplanes like the P-8 submarine hunter and the Maritime Surveillance Aircraft — with autonomous devices that can monitor the seas around the clock.
The goal of the partnership is to provide Boeing’s customers with “the missing link” in a collection of tools that can now span from undersea depths into space, according to Gary Gysin, CEO of Liquid Robotics. The deal, likely to be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, “makes the company,” Gysin said. Among the many options the substantial new revenue gives Liquid Robotics is a possible future IPO, Gysin added.
Liquid Robotics first introduced the Wave Glider in 2011. Depending on the sensors deployed on the maritime robots, they can monitor large areas of the sea at the surface and can detect acoustically down to depths of 8,000 meters.
