SeaAhead Catches up with Julie Angus, Co-Founder & CEO of Open Ocean Robotics

Open Ocean Robotics produces energy-harvesting uncrewed surface vehicles (USV) equipped with sensors, cameras and monitoring equipment to make oceanic observations and instantly relay them. They offer a safe, efficient, and affordable way of collecting ocean data compared to conventional crewed vessels. 

A scientist, adventurer, boat designer, and entrepreneur, Julie Angus cofounded Open Ocean Robotics to help protect our oceans and offer solutions to some of our greatest maritime challenges.

Interview by Clara Winguth, Summer Intern at SeaAhead, Northeastern University '23

What inspired you to create Open Ocean Robotics?

My background is in ocean exploration, and I’ve spent a lot of time in small boats on the ocean. The inspiration behind Open Ocean Robotics was to find a way to better understand our oceans, which are still 80% unexplored, unobserved, and unmapped.

What really drove that home to me was a five-month expedition I did rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, from Portugal to Costa Rica − just me and my partner in an ocean rowboat. When you spend five months in the middle of the ocean, you really get a feel for how big it is, and how nobody really sees what happens out there. There's lots of great reasons for that – the oceans are huge, challenging, and its expensive to get out there. But I think autonomy can overcome a lot of those challenges. Our boats are solar powered, so they can stay out for months at a time, collect data that is so hard to get, and send it back in real time.

Can you describe the functions and capabilities of your two vessels, the Data Xplorer and Force12 Xplorer, and the software behind it? 

Data Xplorer is a solar powered autonomous boat, Force 12 Xplorer is a wind powered autonomous boat, and Lighthouse Control is the command and control software and the data viewing platform. Our boats can be operated anywhere in the world from our mission control. They have satellite communication, cellular and radio. We can see the data that they're collecting, analyze that, and make decisions based on it. Using Lighthouse Control, we can redirect the vessel or tell it to go sample more in one area, displaying the importance of ensuring that the autonomous vessel is controlled and that we're able to have constant communication with it.

Open Ocean Robotic’s USVs have many applications. Could you expand on these varied uses and how they tie into climate change mitigation?

Our boats are focused on maritime protection, so we've done work in illegal fishing enforcement and environmental monitoring, including marine mammal monitoring, measuring oceanographic conditions, and defense and security as well. One of the key components of our Data Xplorer vessels is that they’re completely solar powered, so they produce no greenhouse gas emissions. If you think about an autonomous boat replacing or reducing the time needed for a crewed vessel, you can reduce those greenhouse gas emissions. Then there's the environmental protection aspect of illegal fishing enforcement. A big problem is that 30% of the world's fish caught illegally, often with practices that are also very environmentally destructive. For example, trawling releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide, so by potentially minimizing those activities we can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well.

Are there any applications that you've found success, which were unexpected?

When we started Open Ocean Robotics, we didn't really think about marine mammal monitoring. I don't think we realized how important it is and how good of a platform an autonomous vessel is for collecting marine mammal data especially when you think of acoustics and listening for those vocalizations. Our platform is really quiet and doesn't produce much self-noise, making it really effective.

What challenges have you faced in starting your cleantech company and how have you overcome them?

Starting a company is hard – starting a cleantech company is hard, especially one that's both hardware and software as it costs a lot of money, it takes a long time to develop your technology, and you have to build a good team – which can be hard when you’re based in Victoria, BC as it’s not necessarily an autonomous vehicle hotspot.

Finding talent, raising money, getting customers – those are the key challenges and overcoming them takes intentionality. We’re definitely a mission and value driven company. We believe very strongly in the need to better protect our oceans and enable ocean industries to operate more sustainably on them, and we feel that our solution is a way to enable that. And so that's always been the driving goal and we just keep moving towards that one step at a time. 

Where are your USVs operating now and how do you see that expanding in the future? Any new locations you look forward to?

Right now, we are doing pilot-defined projects on the west coast of BC. Initially, some were supposed to be on the coasts of Massachusetts and California ,which were unable to happen due COVID, but thankfully, we were able to complete them here. But now as restrictions hopefully ease, we'll see deployments elsewhere. Later this year we'll do a month-long deployment in a remote marine protected area of Hawaii which I’m really excited about. We'll do some more on the west coast here as well as along the southern Gulf Islands and further offshore, allowing us to display the many different applications of our technologies.

What are some upcoming advancements in your technology you are most excited about?

We're doing a lot of work in acoustics and optical detection, and I'm excited about the technology advancements we're working on with the machine learning that we're using in our computer vision. Additionally, I'm really excited about the work we're doing in illegal fishing, with the one-month project off of Hawaii in a marine protected area. There’s just such a need for more solutions to combat illegal fishing as shown through 30% of fish being caught illegally which amounts to tremendous numbers. It’s simply very hard to enforce against since our oceans are huge, so seeing what kind of a role autonomous technologies and our USVs can play in that is exciting.

What do you feel sets your company apart from others?

I think it's the combination of innovative technology that's clean tech, and solving a defined problem with real market opportunity. That is very important for sustainability-focused companies to succeed and one of the best ways to address some of the sustainability challenges that we have. If you can create a commercially viable company that is not only meeting a very real pressing customer problem but doing so in a way that reduces greenhouse gas emissions or has other positive environmental impacts, it's a really compelling solution.