Drones at Sea

Unmanned vehicles are in something of a renaissance. UAVs have been patrolling the skies of militarily sensitive regions for more than a decade, and regulatory frameworks – to say nothing of the technology – are being hashed out between governments and manufacturers of autonomous road vehicles as we speak, including in Australia.

Self-driving fleets of transport and public services vehicles have been mooted in the name of safety and efficiency, and unmanned mining and agriculture vehicles are already in use.

One area we don’t hear much about however is in unmanned sailing. After an estimated 11 billion tons of goods were shipped by sea in 2021 alone, it’s an area you’d think was ripe for development, especially as the ocean is still so little understood when it comes to its influence on global climates and ecosystems.

Saildrone is aiming to change that. The Alameda, California-based company builds, designs and operates uncrewed/unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for a range of applications in scientific and commercial activities, sailing into the farthest reaches of the sea for up to a year at a time on nothing but wind and solar power, helping us build a more complete picture of the hydrosphere than ever.

And now, in one sense, Saildrone is returning home. The company recently announced a presence to serve the Asia Pacific region, based in CEO and founder Richard Jenkins’ home town of Perth.

Jenkins, a mechanical engineer, began his career somewhere quite different from autonomous oceangoing vehicles, spending ten years trying to design and build the optimum wind-powered vehicle to break the land speed record, which he did in the Nevada deserts in 2009.

Then, with a revolutionary wind-powered wing technology under his belt, Jenkins moved to San Francisco to set about applying his patented technology to uncrewed vehicles, helping them reach some of the most remote points on the surface of the Earth’s oceans.

Once Saildrone arrives in Australia it’ll be partnering with local shipbuilder Austal. Founded in 1988 in Perth, Austal is a global success story. The shipbuilder and defence contractor designs builds and supports ships for defence and commercial markets like navy, ferries and supply craft for offshore resources and power facilities.

Austal builds ships in Mobile, Alabama, the Perth suburb of Henderson and Balamban, Philippines. Because of an existing relationship with Austal’s US operations, Jenkins says extending the union down under makes perfect sense.

“Austal is the perfect partner because of their experience in advanced manufacturing in aluminium as well as their ability to scale production fast,” says Jenkins of the partnership. “There are almost no other shipyards that can manage the expertise and scale we need. Their experience in larger uncrewed ships gives us a wealth of expertise and lessons that can be utilised in the production of Saildrone Surveyors.”

As it does currently, Saildrone will design the vehicles and build the electro-mechanical systems while Austal will build the aluminium vehicle hull, and assemble, launch and commission the final products. Hulls will be built in both Mobile and Henderson. The fibreglass composite wings are currently built by Saildrone in the US, but later this year when the agreement with Austal ramps up, they’ll be built in Perth as well.

Beyond boats

But with three USV models in service for users around the world, perhaps the most interesting thing about Saildrone is that it doesn’t consider itself to be a boat builder per se. Saildrone’s customers don’t necessarily need USVs themselves. They need information, and Jenkins calls Saildrone first and foremost a data company.

That means the high-fidelity collection, handling, use and provision of information collected by sensors aboard the Saildrone fleet is just as crucial – maybe more so – to its service offering.

“Quality across the data chain of custody is fundamental to our business,” Jenkins says. “The uncrewed vehicle is the truck to get sensors into the ocean, but the data the sensors provide is the product we sell to customers. Data accuracy, integrity, and security are our highest priorities.”

And so far, that product is remarkably solid. When it comes to just one measure – climate data – the science community has expressed particular confidence in the quality of Saildrone’s data when compared to traditional measurement tools like ships and buoys, with over 40 peer-reviewed publications using it.

So as the above seems to confirm, a thorough understanding of how customers are going to use Saildrone’s USVs is a particular value add. Common metocean (meteorology and oceanography) studies usually call for raw data around air and water temperatures, wind speed and direction, tides and surges, etc.

But in bathymetry – the study of the ocean depths and floor, data is delivered both raw and processed and maritime security customers usually receive a processed intelligence feed that’s ready to interrogate using common security reporting systems.

But gathering the highest quality data is impossible without the highest quality sensor platforms, and Saildrone’s three different types of USV are the eye-catching lynchpins of their products, each designed with primary mission styles in mind.

The Explorer, at seven metres long, is most commonly used for metocean data gathering, collecting information around wind speed and direction, air, sea, and surface temperature, barometric pressure, salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen, wave height and period, fish biomass, ocean currents, air/sea carbon exchange and much more. The Voyager, at ten metres long, is best suited to coastal mapping up to 900 metres down and security monitoring.

But most of the action in the partnership with Austal will be around the 20m-long Surveyor. Capable of advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensory mapping (ISR), it will be the flagship in many maritime security programs.

The Surveyor can also take readings of up to 15m above the water’s surface, which reveals more about the behaviour of the water and air than just readings taken at the surface, and is equipped for ocean floor mapping down to 11 kilometres, as far down as the ocean goes at its deepest point on Earth.

Jenkins says each vehicle carries a suite of sensors appropriate to the most common missions each USV will carry out – a feature set the company has perfected and refined over years of operation. But there are always unique requests, so rather than be all things to all people, a Saildrone has what Jenkins calls a ‘flexible architecture’ that can add new sensors and devices if the use case warrants it.

Bringing the sea to life

But a bigger concern facing Saildrone and Austal than hardware is the market they’ll face when they start operating in Australia. Jenkins calls the Indo-Pacific region ‘globally critical’ for USVs, saying says there’s a growing demand he’s here to support.

“We have very significant customer requirements here,” he says, “and it’s those requirements that are driving the need to manufacture locally rather than transport from America.”

So in the hands of a company like Saildrone, might autonomous seagoing craft be as ubiquitous – or at least as widely talked about – as drones in the military or the coming driverless car revolution?

The autonomous ship market was around $9.4bn in 2020 and by one measure it’s expected to reach a little over $17.6bn in 2028. Last financial year alone it grew at a compounded annual rate of 7.1%, and proofs of concept are going on all over the world. January 2022 saw a Japanese car ferry become the first large USV to navigate itself at sea, travelling 240km between two ports.

Militaries are certainly committing to research. As far back as 2017 the US Navy was developed The Orca, a 16m long USV designed to run under its own steam for several months and have a range of around 10,000km.

And late last year the Australian Institute of Marine Science said it intended to reduce diving expeditions to monitor the health of the Great Barrier Reef, instead deploying both remote-controlled and autonomous boats for patrols instead, minimising direct human influence. They’re all the kinds of areas Saildrone describes itself as being at the forefront of.

But surviving in the open ocean for long periods of time is really hard, as Jenkins points out. “That’s probably why maritime autonomy is trailing aerial unmanned systems. But we’ve made some very significant investments over the last ten years and solved the majority of the challenges inherent in uncrewed vehicles at sea. Saildrone USVs (or vehicles) have sailed nearly one million nautical miles and spent 25,000 days in the open ocean.”

Big numbers, but if Saildrone’s plans go well, the company will go much further in the future…

 

saildrone.com