Transforming Ocean Data Collection with Autonomous Drones
Eric and Wendy Schmidt were attracted to the vision of Saildrone from the earliest days of the company’s formation. They recognized the potential that Saildrone’s autonomous surface vehicles offered to transform the way that a wide range of oceanographic data was collected and became the company’s first philanthropic supporters through a previous foundation. Their involvement with Saildrone was one of the earliest inspirations for Schmidt Marine Technology Partners’ mission to support the development of scalable ocean technologies. So, when they founded Schmidt Marine in 2015, Saildrone was an obvious fit as its first project to fund. Then, as the company evolved over the years, the Schmidt Family Foundation’s Impact Investing program came in as a major initial backer in an effort to support Saildrone’s continued momentum.
Richard Jenkins founded Saildrone in 2012 to develop unmanned solar and wind-powered vehicles that could collect ocean data. The goal was not to replace research vessels, but rather to augment conventional oceanographic work by making the collection of certain types of data vastly cheaper; that way, work on ships could focus more exclusively on research that requires in-person human involvement. Having now logged approximately 25,000 days at sea and sailed more than a million nautical miles, Saildrones have made that vision reality. Configurable for an endless range of missions, the vehicles have been used to track great white sharks, sailed through a hurricane collecting atmospheric and oceanographic data, and circumnavigated Antarctica.
“Understanding the seabed is crucial for geophysics, circulation, understanding where the carbon goes, where the heat goes, what’s happening to things like our fish stocks.The difference we can make with this technology is exponential.”
Richard Jenkins
Saildrone vehicles merge multiple sophisticated systems into one rugged package. The drones themselves navigate autonomously according to pre-programmed plans without any human intervention required for months at a time. They can be outfitted with a wide range of sensors to measure everything from temperature to chlorophyll to carbon levels in the water or the atmosphere. Once data is collected, the Saildrones transmit them in real-time to a shore-based data center, where it’s analyzed and applied across a variety of research and conservation areas. These capabilities make it possible to perform a variety of tasks such as collecting data to improve climate models, enabling assessment of fish stocks, and monitoring marine protected areas. More recently, the company has been developing capabilities for seafloor mapping and a host of other applications including maritime security.
Saildrone has become a world leader in providing autonomous ocean data solutions, and the more the team grows, the more exciting it becomes to watch them fill numerous gaps in ocean data collection. As the demand for ocean research and exploration continues to increase, Saildrone vehicles are likely to become an increasingly important tool for scientists, governments, and other organizations.
How the power of community is propelling breakthrough solutions for a sustainable Blue Economy
One of the key questions driving Schmidt Marine’s efforts is how do we stimulate and enable groups to explore more good ideas? We need all the ideas we can get as we tackle the myriad challenges facing the oceans, from how to fish more sustainably to how to reduce the nutrient pollution that leads to dead zones and countless other coastal water declines. That’s why one of our main focus areas at Schmidt Marine is helping to build a marine technology ecosystem that spurs creativity and creates the right environment for ideas to grow into real, scalable ocean conservation solutions.
We were drawn to Ocean Exchange because for more than a decade they have been successfully working toward that same vision, creating a community to showcase good ideas and provide support. Founded in 2011, the organization was created to support the generation and adoption of community-driven solutions in renewable energy, sustainable food production, waste reduction, and water conservation. They recognized a growing need for a more organized effort toward addressing some of today’s most pressing environmental issues, and are now a place where college students and early-stage entrepreneurs can present their ideas, get feedback and publicity, and gain early validation of their work. Those who participate with “solutions inspiring action” benefit from monetary awards, awareness building, and network development. Since its founding, the organization has awarded $2 million in non-dilutive awards to start-ups as seed funding through their annual event, which brings together entrepreneurs, researchers, and companies from around the world to collaborate and share their ideas with funders and advisors.
Each year, a diverse panel of judges look for innovative and globally scalable solutions with working prototypes that can leap across industries, economies, and cultures. Winning ideas are typically those that meet the organization’s growth-minded criteria for feasibility and ease of implementation as well as breadth of application. Following a call for solutions, selected applicants are invited to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to present their work at an annual event each fall. Finalists pitch their ideas in front of a live audience, competing for $100,000 cash awards. At the same event, 10 university finalists pitch for the collegiate awards of up to $25,000. The audience represents a cross-section of global experts from industry, government, conservation, research, and academia, most of which act as delegates whose vote determines the winners.
Support from Schmidt Marine and multiple other funders is allowing Ocean Exchange to expand its awards to include two new topic areas: urban and coastal water, and transportation hubs, with an emphasis on ports. These two new areas complement and have important strategic overlaps with the organization’s other awards, the Neptune and Orcelle, with their emphasis on ocean, coastline, and ocean transportation. The additional award areas will help attract innovators whose start-ups fit in multiple areas, giving them the ability to qualify for more than one award.
How robots are automating kelp forest restoration and advancing cloud-connected marine conservation
Most people know that the health of our oceans plays a major role in the health of our planet. What many don’t realize, however, is the extent to which the health of our oceans hangs in the balance of certain imbalanced ecosystems, thrown off by demand-driven human activities like overfishing and pollution. Kelp forests are one such ecosystem, widely considered one of the most productive ecosystems on Earth. These ecosystems are experiencing massive global, human-induced declines and while solving for these declines remains the ultimate goal, interim solutions are desperately needed to mitigate the damages. Marauder Robotics is developing a promising technology with the potential to fill that gap.
Not only are they critical biodiversity hotspots, they also act as nursery habitats for many species we know and care about, both recreationally and commercially; in addition to providing food and shelter to thousands of species along a large part of the world’s coastlines, these dense, underwater towers of brown algae help mitigate the effects of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
As human activities and ocean temperatures increase stress on these forests, natural predators like otters, lobsters, and fish continue to disappear at alarming rates, as they have been for decades. Furthermore, recent outbreaks of disease have wiped out seastar populations in many regions, further reducing predation pressure on the urchin populations that largely control kelp growth. This has allowed their populations to explode and further disrupt the ecosystem’s homeostasis. Sea urchins cause significant damage to kelp forests by consuming all available plant biomass as their sustenance options dwindle and their population growth goes unchecked. In many cases kelp is almost completely eliminated, creating urchin barrens that pose a serious threat to the resilience of our ocean habitats and subsequent health of the food and air systems on which we all depend.
Traditionally, the process of restoring kelp forests has depended on manually managing urchin populations by sending divers armed with hammers to remove them from impacted regions. This process is time-consuming, expensive, and dangerous for the divers involved, not to mention extremely unscalable. With a total of 3.3 million acres in need of restoration across the globe, the diver deployment strategy was due for an innovative upgrade.
With backgrounds in biomechanical and mechanical engineering and a friendship spanning decades, these two engineers founded Marauder Robotics to create scalable high impact technologies that bring balance back to ocean ecosystems. Their team is developing a marine management tool that leverages computer vision, machine learning, and robotics to not only automate the manual tasks traditionally done by divers, but also to provide flexibility more generally to increase their clients’ efficiency. The Marauder system is a robust and rugged autonomous underwater vehicle platform and data collection hub system that can actively and effectively reduce sea urchin populations at scale.
One component of this system is the Local Urchin Reduction Equipment (LURE), a field-based device that lures urchins into one spot, aggregates them by the dozens, then sends you a real-time alert when they get to a certain density. This allows for a much more efficient robot deployment strategy, and will automatically connect to Marauder’s web portal, Healthy Oceans Management Engagement Resource (HOMER), for real-time access to data analytics and a video feed.
The team has been conducting early testing in Southern California, with plans in place to expand to Washington. Dr. Yancey has estimated that one robot could do the work of 75 commercial divers; where divers can typically only deploy for hours at a time at depths no greater than 120 feet, these artificial predators can be deployed a week at a time at greater depths with vastly lower associated costs.
“If you rely totally on robotics or technology, then you can make the problem worse. If you rely on humans only, then you can’t scale. So you need a combination of the two in order to come up with a solution that can scale…You need both.”
Dr. Dennis Yancy
Our support of Marauder Robotics began at the end of 2019, when they were beginning to explore the urchin removal concept and build a prototype for testing. They were in a similar position to many of the grantees we work with: rich in potential and good ideas but lacking in investors willing to assume the risk of early stage technology development. Fast forward to today, and Marauder Robotics has evolved into an innovative conservationist, working with The Bay Foundation to conduct pilot deployments and gather feedback from both partners and the environment on technological requirements and needed improvements. Long-term, their technology will enable better ocean stewardship and support marine conservation by providing equipment, tools, logistic services, and technology solutions to aquaculture operators, marine managers, fishermen, vessel maintenance workers, and conservationists.
How one data tracking system is democratizing fishing practices on a global scale
Like many of our most successful stories, this one began thanks to a welcome introduction from a connection in the wider ocean tech community, Global Fishing Watch. When we first met Pelagic Data Systems’ CEO, Dave Solomon, in 2015, it seemed clear that his company was on a viable path to creating hardware-based solutions to solve some of the fisheries sector’s biggest data challenges. Though less than a year old, the company was building tools with the potential to profoundly impact the future of sustainable fisheries.
At first glance, PDS’s ultra-light Vessel Tracking System (VTS) device looks like nothing more than the average external hard drive. In reality, these roughly seven-by-three inch piece units hide circuitry that is fighting food insecurity, climate change, overfishing and illegal fishing, and human trafficking in fisheries. These systems are solar powered and completely automated with no external controls. They gather detailed information on a fishing boat’s movements and upload the data via cellular signals.
Fisheries are a primary source of animal protein for a billion people worldwide, but the harmful impacts of climate change and overfishing have given way to a litany of dangerous consequences that have, until technologies like VTS, been nearly impossible to track. Although traditional monitoring technology called Automatic Identification System(AIS) has long been required on larger fishing vessels, these less sophisticated devices are costly, and in many cases ineffective, because they can be manually turned off, leaving much fishing vessel activity in the shadows.
“Our technology allows managers and communities to receive more and better data about their seafood, increasing resilience for this essential value chain in the face of illegal activity and climate effects.”
Dave Solomon, Chief Executive Officer, Pelagic Data Systems and Good Machine
PDS’ waterproof and highly-durable systems track vessel positions down to the second, storing years’ worth of data directly onboard in addition to uploading data in real time, or as soon as a vessel returns to cellular range. While traditional vessel monitoring systems track and report a vessel’s location once every hour, the PDS’ VTS reports once every few seconds. This brings a whole new level of transparency to fishing activities at sea, which have historically occurred untracked and out of sight. From a conservation standpoint, this data on how many boats are fishing and for how long makes it easier to track how many fish are being taken out of an ecosystem, providing actionable insight into fishing pressure in a more granular way. It illustrates the movement patterns of fishing vessels, allowing for stricter enforcement of marine-protected areas by revealing boats that are breaking the rules. This also rewards fishers who follow the rules by allowing them to prove their catches are caught legally and sustainably. The technology also provides additional value to fishers as well. Many small-scale fishers don’t have GPS systems, but the VTS allows them to track precise fishing locations so they can, for instance, identify and avoid areas where bycatch has been high. The systems improve safety by allowing those onshore to identify the location of vessels stuck offshore due to engine problems, a major threat in some areas.
Accessibility was also top of mind for the PDS team as they considered which design elements would make the system most successful for the marginalized communities it needed to support. By offering the VTS at an affordable price point with no user interface and no required technological experience for installation or maintenance, PDS is helping promote financial resilience, in addition to curbing overfishing and illegal fishing. Whatsmore, the seemingly low-tech device sidesteps user error in fisheries data collection, making the data collection and storage through PDS extremely accurate. This type of reliable and self-sustaining data-powered transparency quite literally brings long-hidden illegal activity into the light, forcing a level of accountability and collaborative progress to governments, nonprofits, and the industry at large.
“Traditional vessel tracking devices do not adequately serve the needs of the global majority of fishers who are operating on a small-scale, but Pelagic Data Systems devices do.”
Jen Cole, Director, Climate and Oceans, Good Machine
After funding the development of a gear locator device in 2016, we were excited to increase funding in 2017 to support PDS’ community-oriented work in conservation and resource management in under-resourced communities. East Timor, for example, where the team has done extensive work, has faced numerous challenges. The government there was working on plans to improve their fisheries management to increase food supplies (50% of children under 5 there were suffering from malnutrition), to offer a viable alternative to dependence on offshore oil lease revenues, and to reduce the number of foreign vessels operating illegally in their waters. Pelagic’s work was a critical component in this overall effort. Outfitting local vessels with Pelagic systems has increased fisheries data to allow assessment of fish abundances in different areas and to devise the best plans possible for sustainable fishing.
Time and time again, community plays an invaluable role not only in connecting us with innovative ideas and grant opportunities, but also in the genesis and evolution of the ideas themselves. While work in East Timor was initially supported by Schmidt Marine, and Worldfish, as well as a National Geographic Society Marine Protection Prize. The monitoring is now fully supported by the East Timor government. This shift in ownership was enacted by design, based on the belief that with ownership comes increased investment, autonomy, and independence.
When technology is inspired by interconnectivity and community-building, its impact becomes that much more valuable. To date, there are over 1,000 PDS devices in use by fishers in over 40 countries, totaling over 500,000 cumulative trips, and in June of 2018, PDS won the National Geographic Society’s Marine Protection Prize.
Craig, H. (2019, August 13). Timor-Leste launches world-first monitoring system for small-scale fisheries – CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture. CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture. https://bigdata.cgiar.org/blog-post/timor-leste-launches-world-first-monitoring-system-for-small-scale-fisheries/
Tilley, A. et al. (2021) A randomised controlled trial to test the effects of fish aggregating devices and SBC activities promoting fish consumption in Timor-Leste: A study protocol, medRxiv. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Available at: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261568v1.full (Accessed: April 12, 2023).
