Bedrock's Autonomous Submarine Is the Future of Seabed Surveying
Bedrock is launching a new ocean exploration service based on a fully electric autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Bedrock does not sell AUVs; instead, it uses underwater robots to collect and process data.
The data is then uploaded to Mosaic (a universal cloud data platform) to manage, access and share any marine survey data. According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as of February 2021, 80% of the ocean floor has yet to be explored. This is an opportunity for a solution like Mosaic.
In addition to extensive capabilities for autonomous seabed mapping, where a single conventional survey can take up to 12 months to deliver useful commercial seabed data to clients, Bedrock plans to speed this up 10 times.
“The ocean is a key environment that we must understand in depth to save the planet from climate change and enable sustainable renewable energy. But right now we simply cannot act quickly, because we lack simple and easy access to critical data on how the ocean works, starting with the seabed. Bedrock's vertically integrated seabed data platform, powered by our own AUVs and combined with Mosaic, is the technology needed for a new functional shift in how we work with our oceans”
Fully electric AUVs allow Bedrock to increase the speed and efficiency of seabed surveying and mapping, in some cases delivering data with up to 50 times higher resolution than the best publicly available maps. They create high-resolution geophysical maps of the ocean floor without the need for large research vessels, improving the speed and efficiency of seabed data collection.
Advantages of Bedrock's AUVs:
- a significant reduction in human risk thanks to the use of AUVs, with no navigation hazards at sea;
- a 100% electric vehicle, offering environmental advantages over vessel-based or surface systems;
- minimal risk of harm to animals and the environment, because the size, devices and sonars stay below the limit values for marine mammals (200 kHz);
- new operational flexibility, with faster mobilization and robotic transport by air; minimal impact of weather on schedules, since the vehicle operates underwater and avoids adverse surface conditions;
- resolution and data quality as a selectable variable;
- Mosaic access: all data is stored, available and managed in the cloud, eliminating the need to ship hard drives.
In addition, Mosaic, the company's data platform, is a revolutionary step forward for the entire seabed data ecosystem. The platform's beta waitlist, recently opened to the public, gives all owners, users and managers access to seabed data, allowing them to efficiently share marine survey data.
It is not tied to a particular data collector, which means anyone involved with seabed data (from raw to processed) can have a centralized place to store and work with their data.
“To understand the state of the ocean, we need a baseline set of measurable indicators. Bedrock collects the data needed to take proactive action in areas of strategic importance for progress and prevention, rather than merely reacting. The first and immediate application of our platform is accelerating offshore renewable energy projects, which now need this capability for faster and repeatable detection and monitoring of seabed conditions”
As part of its current services, Bedrock is launching a free tier of 50 GB of private seabed data storage, which allows anyone with an internet connection to publish survey results to a free public ocean dataset, as well as easily download everything already in it.
Bedrock's goal is to encourage the public to contribute any marine data they collect to a public map in the simplest possible way. With Bedrock's AUV-based approach combined with Mosaic, the seabed surveys required for many critical infrastructure projects, including the development, installation and maintenance of every new offshore wind turbine, can be carried out faster, more efficiently and more environmentally cleanly than ever before.
In summary: Bedrock is innovating by creating a highly efficient autonomous submarine. The underwater vehicle can perform autonomous operations, during which it can follow a predefined route, collecting seabed data from various onboard sensors.
The company offers outputs and geodetic maps as a service, allowing clients to use a robotics-as-a-service model without huge capital investment. Data that can be provided includes: electrical conductivity, temperature, depth, multibeam echosounder, side-scan sonar, magnetometer.
