Concept: US ocean bed surveying startup ‘Bedrock Ocean Exploration’ (Bedrock) has launched a marine robotics-as-a-service solution. It includes fully electric autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and Mosaic, a cloud-based ocean survey data platform. The platform is used to manage, access, and share any marine survey data from present or historical surveys.
Nature of Disruption: The Bedrock’s AUV is fully electric that improves its efficiency and speed of seafloor data acquisition and mapping. It comprises conductive, temperature, and depth sensors, multi-beam echo sonar, side-scan sonar, magnetometer, and sub-bottom profiler. Along with AUV, it also offers Mosaic is a cloud-native data platform that supports huge uploads and downloads into the cloud. It provides owners, users, and managers to access seafloor data that enables efficient sharing of marine survey data. Anyone acquiring seafloor data, from raw to processed, has a centralized place to store and work with the data. Bedrock launched a free tier of 50GB of individual seafloor data storage so that anyone can publish survey data to the free, public ocean dataset. Bedrock offers output data and surveys as a service that enables clients to leverage the RaaS solution.
Outlook: The ocean is one of the key environments to map and study that helps to understand climate change and provide sustainable, renewable energy. For this, comprehensive and fast ocean bed mapping is crucial. The traditional method involves mapping the ocean floor through large ships. It is a costlier method and also poses challenges of time-consuming and threat to human life and limitations of individual AUV. Hence, Bedrock came up with a solution in which RaaS-powered AUV and Mosaic cloud data platform ease the work. It increases the efficiency of seafloor data acquisition. Moreover, the solution offered to the client does not require a huge capital investment.
This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk