By Yuliya Chernova
This spring a sea-gliding robot deployed by start-up Liquid Robotics to collect data in the Gulf of Mexico sent an alarming text message to its pilot ashore that something was wrong.
The pilot, who remotely guides the robot on its mission — in this case to collect data on water chemistry, current information, and acoustics for BP PLC — directed it to take underwater pictures of itself. The acoustic instrument had tangled up. It was time to return to port.
Once the robot was back on firm ground, the Liquid Robotics crew found the culprit. The underwater glider, which the robot uses to propel itself under water without the use of any fuel, had bite marks on it. “It was attacked by a shark with about a 12 to 14-inch size bite from the shape of the tooth marks on the gliders fins,” said Bill Vass, the company’s new CEO, who hails from years in the computer industry as a high level executive at Sun Microsystems.
Thankfully, he noted, after 150,000 combined miles at sea with the company’s robots, this was the only shark attack.
“How often in a start-up do you get to say, ‘a shark just attacked my robot,” Vass said.
The robot is back on another mission in the Gulf, about a hundred miles offshore, and is expected to be at sea for another 120 days.
Liquid Robotics’ Wave Gliders have the unique ability to travel for months, years even, across the world’s oceans without having to refuel. They are designed to convert the power of waves mechanically to propel themselves.
This opens up ocean exploration in a way previously unthinkable , said Alan Salzman, who joined the company’s board as a result of a $22 million round of financing the start-up recently raised. The round, which also included small investments from oilfield services company Schlumberger Ltd. and Stanford University, valued the company at about $70 million, including cash on hand, Vass said.
The promise of clean technology is not just in new power-generation, said Salzman, but in applications beyond that. Besides helping BP evaluate water quality in the Gulf, the Wave Gliders are traveling to other disaster sites. They are going to Japan, for example, to measure radiation in the waters there, Vass said.
Other applications are security and weather-related. “A few governments have asked for a “picket fence” application,” Vass said. “For example, having a grid of a thousand robots along their coast tracking ships and subs in their waters as well as looking for a tsunami.”
This is not a nonprofit endeavor. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company expects to have revenue of about $13 million to $14 million this year. It has about 60 robots deployed now.
The primary business model for Liquid Robotics is to deploy robots and sell data they collect. Each annual contract would provide about $500,000, Vass said. The beauty of its business model is that the company could use the same robot, mount various instruments on it, and sell different data to several customers while keeping operating and capital costs nearly stable.
The CEO declined to specify exactly how much it costs to operate and make the robots, but said: “The robots use no fuel, have no crew, have very low liability insurance requirements, and low maintenance costs because of the simplicity of the design,” said the CEO.
When Vass first saw a video of how the glider is made, he said “it was like the invention of the wheel. It was so obvious and beautiful, the way it operated.”
The company was co-founded in 2007 by Roger Hine, who is now chief technical officer.
For Vass, turning from the world of Sun Microsystems to the ocean was in some ways a return to what he has done many years ago. “In a galaxy far, far away,” he said, he was a merchant marine, wrote software that was used to design submarines and ships, worked offshore on geoseismic vessels, and worked for Western Geophysical as a data processor and programmer.