Ulysses
Autonomous vehicles for surface and subsea work
What would it take to work the ocean without sending a ship?
The ocean covers about 71% of the planet, and a lot of what the rest of it runs on goes across or under the water. Submarine cables carry 99% of the data crossing the oceans: internet traffic, military transmissions, financial transactions. Almost none of it is watched.
An autonomous underwater vehicle, or An autonomous underwater vehicle: a robot that follows a mission underwater without a person steering it., is a robot that goes about its work underwater without anyone steering it. Its older cousin, the An underwater robot driven by a pilot on a ship, usually through a tether that carries power and video., is driven and powered from the surface, usually through a tether back to a host ship. AUVs carry sonars and depth sensors, and survey companies send them to map the seafloor before a pipeline goes in, then back again to inspect it.
The first thing a robot loses when it dives is GPS, because radio barely gets into water. From then on it is guessing, carefully. An inertial system works out position from measured motion, a A sonar that bounces sound off the seafloor to measure how fast the vehicle is moving over it. clocks speed over the seabed, and a pressure sensor gives depth. If someone has laid acoustic Acoustic beacons that answer a vehicle's ping, letting it work out its range to known points. on the seabed, those can pin the guess down now and then. The name for all this is Working out where you are from a known starting point plus measured speed, heading and elapsed time..
Further reading Ocean (Wikipedia)Submarine communications cable (Wikipedia)Autonomous underwater vehicle (Wikipedia)Remotely operated underwater vehicle (Wikipedia)
- i.
Errors that compound
Inertial navigation has a flaw baked in. Tiny errors in measured acceleration and rotation add up into ever larger errors in position, and even the best accelerometers would drift 50 metres within 17 minutes. Picture crossing a field with your eyes shut, counting steps. Ten paces, fine. A thousand, and you're in the next field. So the robot needs outside corrections, and acoustic positioning only works if someone has set out beacons first.
- ii.
Shouting through water
Underwater, robots talk over Devices that send data as pulses of sound through water, since radio does not carry., which is to say with sound. Sound travels at about 1,500 metres per second, carries very little data, and echoes send each message down several paths at once. Next to radio on land, the data rates are tiny. Engineers rank acoustic messaging among the most difficult communication media in use, which from engineers is strong language.
- iii.
Everything starts with a ship
Most underwater work still begins and ends on deck. An ROV hangs off its ship on a tether. An AUV swims free, but someone has to launch it and fish it back out, and the support ship is a big part of what the job costs. AUVs already took survey work into places where the old methods were too costly. They didn't get rid of the ship. When it heads back to port, the work stops with it.
- iv.
Infrastructure nobody watches
Those cables count as critical infrastructure for international security, and they lie on the seabed mostly unobserved. The usual way one gets broken is a fishing boat dragging gear. The unusual way is harder to see coming: small underwater vehicles can damage a cable covertly and leave without being detected. Watching something like that means being there all the time, which a ship on a day rate can't do.
Further reading Inertial navigation system (Wikipedia)Underwater acoustic positioning system (Wikipedia)Autonomous underwater vehicle (Wikipedia)Underwater acoustic communication (Wikipedia)Submarine communications cable (Wikipedia)
Ulysses calls what it is building the operating system for the ocean: networked fleets of low-cost autonomous vehicles that work above and below the surface. The same hardware is meant for restoring seagrass meadows, securing critical infrastructure and keeping persistent watch in contested waters.
Restoration came first on purpose. It needs complex sensing and precise physical work in water that won't hold still, which makes it the hardest version of the problem. Ulysses calls that pairing Ulysses's term for pairing sensing with physical work: mapping the seabed, then acting on it.: map the seabed, then do something to it. Their bet is that if restoration can be made autonomous, anything underwater can.
Further reading About (Ulysses)
- Step 1: Cheap, and lots of them
The vehicles are built to be "up to 50x cheaper" than legacy ones, cheap enough to field in numbers, and they talk to each other, so they can work as a swarm instead of one precious robot at a time. Ulysses says the Mako carries 40 times more subsea computing power than other small and medium vehicles, enough to make its own decisions, which matters when the acoustic link home is a trickle. It is rated for 72 hours of endurance and 5,000 ft of depth.
- Step 2: Parts that swap
The Mako's modules and The swappable equipment a vehicle carries for a job, such as a sonar, a camera or a robotic tool. swap like Lego. It comes apart in minutes and goes back together for a different mission, carrying whichever sensor or tool the job needs.
- Step 3: Hands as well as eyes
Surveying is the read half. The vehicles are built to carry robotic payloads for the write half: repairing infrastructure, planting seeds, and other fine motor work on the seabed.
- Step 4: Nobody at the dock
Surface and subsea are designed as one system. Kraken launches, recovers and recharges vehicles, so a mission can run from start to finish without people, and without a ship waiting on the other end.
Further reading Stewarding the Oceans (Ulysses)Our Technology (Ulysses)
When a cable goes dark, who did it?
Even after the fact, pinning an incident on a specific actor, or a motive, is hard. Persistent eyes on the seabed would change what can be known. How much it changes what people do about it is a separate question.
How much should a robot decide on its own?
With acoustic links this thin and this noisy, a fleet can't be steered move by move from shore. Every vehicle has to judge most things itself, and nobody has settled where the line should sit for work like repairs, or for anything in contested water.
Further reading Submarine communications cable (Wikipedia)Autonomous underwater vehicle (Wikipedia)Underwater acoustic communication (Wikipedia)
Ulysses builds autonomous vehicles that keep the oceans safe, healthy and prosperous: networked fleets of low-cost vehicles working above and below the surface, which the company calls an operating system for the ocean. Its vertically integrated hardware and software are built to restore ecosystems, defend critical infrastructure and keep persistent watch at sea.
Mako, its autonomous underwater vehicle, is modular: sensor, battery, thruster and payload modules swap in minutes, so one vehicle can survey, inspect, or carry robotic tools for repair and planting. Kraken launches, recovers and recharges vehicles, so missions run start to finish without a crew. The founding team has built Formula 1 cars, autonomous vehicles, satellites and deep-sea robots.
- AUV
- An autonomous underwater vehicle: a robot that follows a mission underwater without a person steering it.
- remotely operated vehicle
- An underwater robot driven by a pilot on a ship, usually through a tether that carries power and video.
- dead reckoning
- Working out where you are from a known starting point plus measured speed, heading and elapsed time.
- Doppler velocity log
- A sonar that bounces sound off the seafloor to measure how fast the vehicle is moving over it.
- transponders
- Acoustic beacons that answer a vehicle's ping, letting it work out its range to known points.
- acoustic modems
- Devices that send data as pulses of sound through water, since radio does not carry.
- payloads
- The swappable equipment a vehicle carries for a job, such as a sonar, a camera or a robotic tool.
- read-write
- Ulysses's term for pairing sensing with physical work: mapping the seabed, then acting on it.
- 1Autonomous underwater vehicle · Wikipedia
- 2Inertial navigation system · Wikipedia
- 3Underwater acoustic communication · Wikipedia
- 4Submarine communications cable · Wikipedia
- 5Ocean · Wikipedia
- 6Stewarding the Oceans · Ulysses
- 7About · Ulysses
- 8Our Technology · Ulysses
- 9Remotely operated underwater vehicle · Wikipedia
- 10Underwater acoustic positioning system · Wikipedia