The oceans may cover more than 70 % of the Earth’s surface, but we have better moon maps more than the sea floor. There are good reasons for that: the ocean bottom is blocked, and the harsh environment makes it difficult to send humans down for a closer look. But as robots improve, we may finally get a clearer image about the deep abyss.
There are a number of Emerging companies The race to appoint the ocean in more detail, but the latest to the failure of fresh financing FoundationWhich recently closed a 25 million dollar series of A-2 series led by Primary and Northzone, the company expressed exclusively Techcrunch. Share Autopilot, Costanoa Ventures, Harmony Partners, Katapult and Mana Ventures.
Ocean Ocean developed An independent underwater vehicle (AUV) that works for up to 12 hours of Li -Ion batteries while drawing maps for the floor using sonar and magnetic sensors.
Traditionally, the ocean bottom is assigned by large ships, which explodes the strong sonar pulses in the water column. These ships spoil fuel and require human operators, making them expensive to sail and disrupt marine life.
“The bowl at the end of the rainbow that everyone was chasing for 20 years had been, could we replace traditional ships?” Bedrock Ocean told Techcrunch.
AUVS of Bedock Ocean is still launched from a ship, but as soon as it works underwater, it works independently of it. He said that two of them could cover the same land as a traditional maps ship, and one ship can carry 40 feet from 10 to 12 AUVS.
Bedrock designs and builds his AUVS, which MAH said is less than a million dollars each. The company has also developed its own AUVS operating program and appointing the appointment. AUVS stores data locally and performs some processing on the plane. When the time comes, they appear and send data to the ship via Wi-Fi. Starlink antenna on board the ship can stimulate this information to the cloud, where observers can monitor things.
Maha said: “We can confirm that the data is one of the quality that we target, as well as define the potential goals that we want to investigate in the real time.”
Submarines sail from five to 10 meters over the sea floor, allowing AUVS to use the less powerful sonar of the ship -based maps drawing. Mah said that Sun in your hand offers less harm to marine mammals because their frequency is outside the audible range, and uses less power, and is deployed near the sea floor, which means that animals are less likely to swim in the sonar path.
Rulings can place the elements on the ocean bottom with two to two meters. This is less than the surveys that the sub -accuracy ships can transport, because AUVS loses GPS signals after diving. To determine their underwater position, they rely on self -deficiency, which is inaccurate like GPS.
MAH argues that not every survey need a sub -accuracy, but many operations on the sea floor will benefit from the mapping faster. Wind developers may push abroad for a survey of the sub -material at the forefront, but when time is for construction, there may be areas where you are sufficient and sufficient accuracy.
The startup has spent the last two quarterly a paid questionnaire for external winds, oil, gas and environmental assessments. The speed of the rating, and the ability to display data quickly, caught the attention of the US Navy. “We have shown this ability,” said what. “They were a kind of explosion.”
https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bedrock_AUV.jpg?resize=1200,675
Source link