SeaAhead Catches up with Alessandra Bianchi, at SeaTrac Systems
SeaTrac designs and develops uncrewed surface vehicles for persistent in-shore and open-ocean missions. Energy is derived from solar panels; propulsion comes from a highly efficient electric motor. Power from the vessel’s substantial battery storage allows for consistent cruise speeds over days with varying weather conditions.
Interview by Taylor Witkin, Program Manager at SeaAhead
Can you tell us a bit about SeaTrac's origin story? Why did you get into the ASV market?
SeaTrac co-founders Buddy Duncan and Jigger Herman met in MIT’s Naval Architecture Department about 30 years ago and they’ve never been able to resist a cutting-edge technical challenge. Their second company, HomeLogic, specialized in home automation 10 years before the term
smart home came into being. The spark for SeaTrac came when Buddy was in a hotel room while overseeing manufacturing of HomeLogic components and came across some YouTube videos about autonomous surface vessels, and thought he could build a better one. He began his new design, inspired by the sailboats he raced as a kid. Jigger was wrapping up a stint at iRobot, working on navigation & collision avoidance on the Roomba, & teaching a machine learning course and quickly caught Buddy's enthusiasm. They spent the next 2 years designing & building their prototype red boat.
We spent a year doing missions with WHOI, the Navy Seals, Teledyne & others which informed the improvements for the yellow production model SP-48, which is fast (5 knots), solar powered, and has a higher battery and payload capacity. It’s also much easier to launch and recover and comes at a lower price point than many others on the market.
Last spring you announced the sale and delivery of your SP-48 USV to Mississippi State University’s Geosystems Research Institute (GRI). Can you tell us about the work your vehicle will be doing?
The team at MSU is using our boat for persistent monitoring of waterborne biochemical agents in navigable waterways such as urban rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. The Army Corps of Engineers has asked them to study real time water quality monitoring and threat assessment of navigable waterways of the Gulf of Mexico region. GRI develops, operates, and maintains an increasingly integrated research and transition program, which raises awareness and understanding of the Gulf region.
Uncrewed vehicles are pretty hot in the bluetech space these days. What sets you apart from other USV companies and why did GRI decide to go with SeaTrac?
Right from the start of SeaTrac, Buddy and Jigger emphasized the three overriding principles that have served them well in their previous endeavors: making complex tech simple, reliable, and cost-effective.
MSU wanted a boat with enough power to support a suite of sophisticated biological and chemical sensors as well as one that could hold station and operate in very shallow waters. Happily, our solar-powered SP-48 ticked all of those boxes. It’s an ideal test platform that can persistently and autonomously monitor an area for months.
What kind of sensors does it have onboard?
It’s equipped with sensors that measure conductivity, temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll a (a measure of total phytoplankton biomass), phycocyanin (a measure of freshwater cyanobacteria), phycoerythrin (a measure of saltwater cyanobacteria), three sizes of backscattering, colored dissolved organic matter (CDOM), turbidity, and partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2). Whew! It also has an Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) that is going to provide image records of particles in the water including detritus, algal cells and their colonies.
The MSU set up is an example of how versatile we can be. Buddy and Jigger designed the SP-48 to be multi-purpose and sensor agnostic so users can customize the platform based on their mission specifications.
In addition to near-shore environmental monitoring, you also have applications in the offshore wind sector. What services do you provide for offshore wind developers?
There are lots of applications for surface vehicles in offshore wind. And our boat can extract data from the ocean and monitor conditions more persistently, safely, and affordably than traditional, more personnel-intensive methods. It performs hydrographic surveys, geophysical and geotechnical surveys, persistent meta-ocean data gathering, windspeed measuring, and marine mammal monitoring.
It can also operate very near shore, in about two feet of water as well as in the open ocean, which could be ideal for activities like cable routing surveys and inspections. From our understanding the boats that usually perform these functions are very expensive, in short supply and often constrained by rules of operation for the health and safety of the crews. And offshore wind developers make massive multi-million-dollar decisions during construction and operation based on the data in these reports. As with many in water operations, offshore wind involves many tasks that are dirty, dull, dangerous or expensive, which is perfect for a USV.
What are the next big steps for SeaTrac, as the offshore wind industry continues to grow?
We are currently planning several projects to demonstrate the value of the SP-48 in OSW survey and monitoring applications, by working with established service providers who are among those companies that will be doing this work for the OSW projects going forward. We are also working to promote our capabilities to the other stakeholders in the OSW process to help raise awareness of the value of un-crewed vehicles for OSW.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of SeaTrac’s work? What have you appreciated the most about the journey to get to where you are today?
In a former life I wrote about startups for Inc. Magazine. After 12 years of traveling around the country to trade shows, covering a new industry every month, and picking the brains of clever people, I felt like I knew something about entrepreneurship. But the karma of the universe has put me in the very humbling and thrilling position of working for a startup, versus merely writing about one. The two are entirely different experiences.
If anything, I am even more in awe that companies start from nothing and create world-changing products and services. Meeting and working with people involved with the ocean who are trying to make a difference is especially gratifying and fascinating. On good days, working at SeaTrac feels like being in a James Bond movie. On more challenging ones, I wish I had taken more STEM courses in school versus my beloved Liberal Arts and humanities courses. But I think engineers can benefit by being around English majors and vice versa! As I like to say, even autonomy requires a village.