The Advantage of Fins with Pliant Energy Systems | Ep. 325

fins with robohub the podcast for news and views on robotics hello and welcome to the robohub podcast in today's episode we will hear from benjamin pietro filardo ceo and founder of client energy systems as you may guess from its name this organization did not start out as a robotics company instead client energy systems was originally focused on developing a new way to generate electricity from the flow of water by using a specially designed fin an approach that presents multiple advantages over traditional turbines and rotors which they did successfully it was only after demonstrating that the company could build effective fins for energy harnessing that the team at blind decided to turn their fins into propellers for a robot developing a novel form of actuation this robot now called velox is able to travel in water on land and on ice our interview abarte found out more for us when he spoke to plein ceo and founder hey there welcome to robohub thank you um could you introduce yourself my name is pietro filardo and i'm the founder and ceo of client energy systems we're based in brooklyn we are a both a renewable energy and a robotics company specifically marine robotics that's really cool what's your what's your background why did you initially start this company well my background is not typical um but i find in the field of robotics that people come from all kinds of backgrounds so i studied in biology and oceanography and then i went into design and i studied architecture i worked in architecture when i returned to some renewable energy concepts i had json sorry about that i returned to this energy concept i had while studying marine biology and oceanography observing the power of water and the power of waves and uh i had some concepts that i thought about back then that i put aside while i pursued a career in architecture while always maintaining an interest in in technology and engineering and then a few years ago my brother frank sent me a paper on something called the dielectric elastomer which is to make a long story short it's a composite material sometimes referred to as a smart material that if you stretch and relax it you can turn the material strain into electrical energy conversely if you apply charge to this material you can get it to expand and contract this was a big deal in the 90s people were thinking we finally have an artificial muscle we can get non-linear actuators and we can have a non-linear mechanical system to harness uh to create electricity and it that was the inspiration for starting the company was to find a way to harness the flow of rivers and streams so directional fluid flow using this new material called the dielectric elastomer at the time dielectric elastomer generators for uh for water power applications were taking linear mechanical systems conventional linear mechanical systems such as a water wheel and attaching it with the say asymmetrical crankshaft to a piece of dielectric elastomer so the the wheel spins just as the water wheel always did spin and in the process the shaft stretches and relax and relaxes a piece of section of dielectric elastomer material um so my thinking was that because we had this new non-linear material something that that is being strained and relaxed to create electricity uh what would the what kind of a structure what would the overall system architecture look like for a dielectric elastomer generator and so i started looking at non-linear mechanical systems to harness non-linear mechanical generator and my first conceptions were for capturing the fluid flow of streams and rivers and i filed some patents on on these concepts and to my surprise the patents got got granted several of them fairly quickly and then i applied for funding um to a couple of different government agencies and to my surprise i got the funding these were the sbir programs the department of defense and the u.s department of agriculture and also new york state funded us so with this grant funding and a little bit of private capital i was able to hire my first employees and start doing some r d and start turning these what had really been concepts sort of imagined uh you know visually conceptually imagined and modeled geometrically but not modeled uh analytically uh in my mind um to actually explore some of them with people people first hires a couple of phds one in the uh one of them in mechanical engineering to actually people with the tools and the expertise to put some of the things that had conceptualized into practice and in particular dr dan zimmerman an experimental physicist and the designer michael weak um it remarkably it was to me it was remarkable at the time that these conceptions were actually real they couldn't they were realizable funding for the austin naval research to develop a generator for streams currents and we built it and it worked can you describe how it looked for us yeah so the the essential innovation that plant energy has been working on all this time is a uh it is it it's an undulating member so it's like a fin of let's just say you know a knife fish they have that long fin onto the belly that the traveling wave undulation passes through the fin or a cotton fish or a stingray that sort of traveling undulation through a fin that is what you see in both our generator our energy harnessing technology and most significantly because it's where we've made the most progress in our robotics system so essentially we have developed a new type of transducer it's a transducer that takes the form of a flexible undulating traveling wave and just as a aeroplane propeller for example uh interacts with fluid to create thrust a wind turbine is really the is really the techno it's really the inversion of that so in a wind turbine rather than consuming energy to create thrust with the with the propeller blades in one timeline it's a passive system that receives receives kinetic energy from fluid flow air in case of wind turbine and converts that into electrical energy so a wind turbine and a fan or a turbo prop really seems opposite side of the same technology coin so applying energy's undulating fin when it's working in generator mode it's really acting like the blades of a wind turbine except that rather than rotating the fluid flow creates positive negative pressures along the length of the fin and that causes the undulation to travel and you turn that undulating action that mechanical undulating action into electrical energy or to some other kind of useful mechanical work such as uh pump in the general mode you take that same fin and you actuate the fin so you you induce traveling waves to pass along the fin consuming energy to do that batteries in our case that creates a propulsive thrust in the water and what we found is that the we as i would started saying we got funding from the office naval research to do a generator and it worked but you know there's a there's a there's an infinite number of ways to generate electricity but it has to be cheap and it has to be robust um what we thought our energy harnessing mechanism had in its favor for rivers and streams was it that it would be robust uh so laden systems in a fluid flow like view an undammed unregulated waterway such as a naturally flowing river or stream the typical approach is to put what's essentially an upside down windmill excuse me a submerged is to put a submerged windmill essentially attached to the riverbed and the water flows over the blades and makes it spin turns the turbine um the problem with that system and there's been a lot of effort put into it over many years is that unregulated waterways inevitably it's just a matter of time but for a tree trunk or a branch or a some other debris will impact the blades uh up in with wind turbines you don't really have that problem you're up in the cliff in a clear freight free air you might kill a boat or two there might be a fluke airplane or drone collision but up in the air it's clear skies except there's a hurricane or something whereas in the water if it's a naturally flown river which is the idea with these with these systems to avoid the expensive building dams and so forth is the object your energy harnessing mechanism object has to be able to withstand anything that comes uh down the river and bladed systems tend to get broken or they tend to tangle in the water um they get wrapped up with cable or fishing line if they're small so our system because it doesn't rotate because it undulates and because it is attached to a tether like a kite rather and the whole system is in tension as self-reacting you need very little secondary structure in order to for it to operate doesn't need to be rigidly coupled to a stiff mask a stiff mast that's in the the riverbed that will be able to withstand impact from the occasional heavy object so the idea was it deflects heavy objects uh doesn't require expensive foundations or moorings to attach itself and so that all worked it all worked as expected but it there wasn't a clear path at that time to how to make this generator uh low cost uh and uh and robust in other ways so it won't break but there's an awful lot of engineering work would be required um to bring the power up so we sort of put that aside for a while the navy became very interested in its obvious applications as a marine propulsion system specifically for a small robotic system so a colleague and i took a trip down to the oxford naval research headquarters in arlington virginia um and we talked to a program officer there dr tom mckenna within moments he realized the difference of what we were doing and we got some we submitted an unsolicited proposal they started working so the navy has been primarily funding the robotic system since then and we uh we developed to the robot that that some people have seen the prototype is called deluxe and the next generation will be called c-ray the of so i'm looking thinking some what are the advantages of a robot that has undulating fins instead of propellers always say that the undulating fin concept for a marine robotic system has been around for a long time people have tried for years to to design and implement an undulating fin that has the high efficiency and some of the other benefits which we can touch on later of a nigerian thin versus a propeller we were the first ones to i guess crack the secret of how to create an efficient undulating fin drive we did that through you know it's essentially a solid mechanics a continuous mechanics problem uh so we developed the first fin that is very efficient so the amount of electrical energy that goes into the mechanical energy to move the fin we get a very high uh static thrust so the static truck the thrust per watt is very good and that is what was observed in some aquatic animals that had these traveling wave fins was observed that they get an awful lot of thrust through a very little consumption of power which you can you can measure by looking at the oxygen consumption rates in water where the fish is swimming is your is your system comparable to the biological system's energy efficiency yeah it's it's yes it is and it's it's in some ways it may be even better um but we we have yet to prove just how efficient it can be it's a a question of continuum mechanics and also some pretty clever some pretty fancy geometry pretty complex geometry to get the fin to behave in the way you want it to uh you know it's a it's essentially a four-dimensional object our thing because with the fourth dimension of course being time because it doesn't have any any fixed static position so the thin undulations move very easily along the fin and the fin can be in almost infinite number of configurations within certain boundary conditions as opposed to uh you know a fit like a propeller blade whether it's on the turbine or it's on a on a on a boat that has a shape that you move this shape is indeterminate shall we say um that's the secret of why this fin is so effective um can you describe how those fins are actuated like where the motors are are there multiple fins on this robot per se yeah so the the robot we've developed has two things and the ones that we anticipate developing down the future have two fins and that gives you uh we've already established the high efficiency of the fins when you have two of them you either side of a symmetrical body you get extremely high maneuverability and this was one of the things that that was very uh very intriguing to the austin level research because we have in addition to thrust vectoring which is what you get with the propeller we also have drag vectoring so you have these large these spins that have a larger surface area interacting with a large amount of water so the fins when the traveling wave is moving along the fin it moves a large volume of water but fairly slowly rather than a propeller which spins very fast typically and moves a small jet of water very fast so that means that these fins are very quiet and it's partly why they're so efficient we don't get cavitation we don't get vortex juice vibrations drag vectoring is key to their maneuverability because if the robot let's just say is moving forward with both fins actuated in a straight line if one fin stops the robot will now pivot around in center point uh and it means that you can use drag to control your direction your velocity and your position as much as you can use thrust because you're interacting with a large surface area of water so if the robot is moving forward both in fins are undulating and then the undulations stop the robot will stop almost instantly because the large surface area of its fins create a lot of drag and then if the fins go into reverse the robot can now move backwards at the same speed as moving forward almost instantaneously where with the propeller driven system you have to have you have to wind up and wind down speed up uh and slow down and propellers and the propellers don't work backwards as well as they do forwards whereas our fins are pretty uh they don't care if it's forward or backwards so we have two things per robot the what we proved is that these fins can be created and we we did thousands of hours of numerical modeling to get to where we are and we proved that they have their high efficiency and we demonstrated a robot with two of these fins has very high maneuverability with a very low energy budget in terms of how to make them in their fin move in terms of how to actuate the fin there are many ways to do that and we explored several ways um the prototype deluxe that you've seen uses a series of servos the next um version which we hope will be the one we bring to market uh does not use circles in that manner exactly how we do it you know that's something that we would we keep close to our chest we have explored uh even using a fluidic drive to make the fins undulate so rather than having electric motors we have a series of pumps um and that's that's an alternative way to do it that would make it even quieter so to have an almost silent uh marine robot which is something obviously the military is interested in to not have the the vortex juice vibrations to not have the cavitation of a rapidly spinning propeller and then also not to have the war of the motor uh you've got a very quiet uh stealthy robot which um i think that's of interest also to the to the navy the most i can see a lot of uses for say military and navy um do you have any descriptions of uses outside of the the military navy that could also benefit from this yes we do there are it's a it's a completely new system like as i mentioned people have tried to do angeline things but because none of them work well no one's really explored the different applications we've had a chance to look at different applications and see just what these fins are good for and one of the things we found out during the the navy funded research is that the way we design these fins is that they work on land as well as in water so obviously propeller is useless on land if you want to have an amphibious vehicle with propellers for the water it's going to have to have wheels or something when it gets to the beach or tracks we have with our robotic system the same things that are very effective at moving through water both in terms of efficiency and in terms of maneuverability can also move over land so it doesn't really like to move over land right it's a little uncomfortable but it can do it so it can swim efficiently efficiently long distances in water and then it can move up out of the water onto land um it can do it horribly it sort of crawls along it in the water it's like a cuttlefish or a stingray on land the movement movement of the fins is more like um more like a millipede with an infinite number of legs so the wave undulations move forward when it's traveling on land and the wave undulations move backwards when it's in the water the most surprising property that we found with implications for how it that what the technology could be used for is the fins make an excellent ice skating mechanism to the best of knowledge um this is the first truly ice skating robot in that the fins which have uh the fins use anisotropic friction in the way that an ice skater does so in the water it's sufficient on land it's manageable on ice is probably the most efficient mode of all so you have this one set of fins that's swimming through the water can crawl across sand dot mud pebbles and then can glide over ice and the the backward travel of the undulations on ice is almost the same speed as the forward progress of the robot which means very high efficiency we haven't actually done uh we haven't quantified it in detail um but we have qualitatively observed ridiculously high efficiency on nice which is sort of what you expect actually um when you think about um if somebody's on ice skates and you give them a shove you both go backwards and you keep moving for a long time because there's very little friction right so we have that applications for his ice skating ability obviously ice rescue scientific uh explorer explorations um polar scientific applications um polar exploration polar prospecting i think that we've had interest from various scientists in its polar applications other research scientists who uh have an issue with their exploit with the research they're doing where you have because of climate change you have lakes and rivers appearing uh where there are one not on any map last year so we have a rover that can travel over the ice organic gathering data and then if it comes across a lake in the ice or river it can swim through it and then continue on its way now when it's on ice are the fins still at the side um do they do they move around um is it exactly the same uh orientation of the robot as it goes across these three different environments the only change between ice and water is the fins go down so the fins are out to the side when it's through the water most of the time the fins can be down or up but most of the time the fins will be out the side while traveling through water on ice the fins are pointing straight down they're overall pointing straight down because the individual undulations move side to side but the net direction of the fin is is tilting down uh when it's moving over over solid ground the fins are at a sort of in between the swimming mode and the ice mode that sort out at an angle to one side so other applications that you mentioned beyond the the obvious military ones that you asked about um we think that in the civilian market that a big opportunity is with uh sewer inspection culprit inspection pipeline inspection where you have a mixture of fluids and solids so it's not particularly glamorous but the u.s has 800 000 miles of sewer line uh and to be able to send the robot that can swim through the watery parts and then crawl or burrow through these solid parts is a key advantage there are vehicles that do that now they tend to be either they have propellers or they're trapped and attract heavy crawlers and the obviously the propeller driven uh vehicles by the way most of these are remotely operated tether um and then you have the uh remotely operated tracked vehicles for exploring these environments and they um they can get stuck fairly easily uh and they also cannot swim up to look at say the top of the tunnel to inspect what's happening there they're gravity-based and they're dead down on the ground down on the bottom of the pipe plowing through whatever whatever is there so that's a that's a significant civilian market you also think there are applications in our coastal research coastal science monitoring water quality monitoring environmental conditions because we don't have to worry about getting tossed up on the beach by a wave and then being stranded we don't have to worry about getting stuck in mud because the robot is very good at modern we can go through swamps and we can swim or crawl when we come across a swamp or marshy area whereas other remotely operated vehicles or autonomous vehicles for coastal environments either they swim through the watery park or they mostly use tracks uh to crawl through the through the um through the swampy pass through the muddy marshy areas but we can do both and we don't run the risk of getting stuck in mud the way a tract crawler would and i think that's another area the military's pointed to that they're interested in is on checking is um surveying for unexploded ordnance uh it's it's it's that historically the us used uh swell plans and marshlands for uh as artillery firing wages and there's a lot of land now uh that is filled with uh unexploded ordnance that is that the the department of defense wants to decommission and hand over to the public for you know for a recreational use to make them into parks and so forth but they they're dangerous to do that um so using our robotic system to travel through swamps and marshes to identify uh mines and other exploded ordnance shells so that the land can be returned to other uses is a potentially uh important application both in terms of um in terms of being very effective and also reducing their risk of having people have to do that task which is very time consuming and obviously very dangerous one of our robots enough it's not the end of the world how does the uh how does the robot scale are there multiple different sizes could you make a robot say the size of a computer mouse and have it go through very small sewer lines just as easily as you could have something say the size of a killer whale yeah that's a the scaling question is one we've looked at a little bit in terms of going down in scale we can absolutely go down smaller or smaller how we would engineer the the how would engineer the transmission system would change we're going to make it very small but it definitely can get very small we've had inquiries from uh there's a company in india that would like very small robot to look to swim around the oil inside the um they had these transformers that are fluid filled and they would like to be able to send a robot there and because we can swim through viscous fluids oil or mud um that's an application for a very small robot that people have made requests we could design one for them when it comes to scaling up on land it's going to be more challenging to make them very heavy um you know it's no coincidence the largest organisms live in water and as you start to get very large on land um structural issues become uh become challenging so we think in terms of scaling up uh in the ocean in water we think about body lengths per second so if we take a robot that's one meter long and it has one wave cycle of undulations along it we can only go so fast before the wave undulations are traveling at a speed this that's somewhat impractical we double the size of the robot becomes two meters long instead of one meter long um we think the speed will double so potentially a very large robot could achieve high speeds it wouldn't look from a distance like if the fins are moving that fast because there's sort of an optimal efficiency for how fast the things move relative to their size so to get speed we just scale up and the blue whale for example is one of the fastest swimmers uh in the oceans and the tail is moving gently along but it's moving at tremendous speed on land it's going to be hard to scale we don't know what the limits are part of the upper weight limit on land will be determined by what more we can do with fins um it is possible we can make the fins withstand heavier loads than we currently think but that's that's ongoing uh research and i understand that um this company you're still mostly in an r d mode correct you're not currently selling directly to any customers no we're not selling too many customers yet we had a lot of uh we get a lot of inquiries from customers it's an it's been an interesting uh sort of uh free marketing uh we've opportunity we've had with the with some of the pr we've gotten on various stories and publications youtube channels and so forth uh it's been interesting to see who gets in touch with us and who wants to buy one wants to know more about them and we have people uh for example in aquaculture one very interesting example was a large indonesian shrimp farmer who needed to be able to inspect their shrimp pools the problem they had with existing uh robotic systems is the propellers would uh turn the the nymph shrimp the very small shrimp into puree so then they put screens over the propellers to try to stop the shrimp from being drawn into the propellers and then the screens would just get blocked so he would he was interested in having one of our robots go down and swim amongst the shrimp and inspect the shrimp take samples see what's happening on the bottom see what food they're eating or not eating without actually you know without chopping up the shrimp that's one example we had contact by seaweed farmers quite a few search and rescue operations ice rescue some some emt organizations from different parts of the world have contacted us and i mentioned the the industrial company in india that's looking for a small robot that can swim through the fluid to the oil in the transformer stations and we've had some marine scientists contact us about the ice skating ability for polar science and we've had a lot of people in the also from around the world in our culvert inspection drain inspection and so forth you can see that i see the limits of the equipment that they have so far and see this is potentially filling up or filling a gap in their capabilities and do you ever see a world in which this could be used um this undulating fin as a form of propulsion for a vehicle that carries people in the water potentially so the advantage of this underlying propulsion system for a surface chip for example um you know a a prop on the shaft the motor is a pretty mature technology it's pretty good in many ways the fin is not as simple to construct and fabricate as a prop spinning on the shaft right so it's more complex than a propeller by with a shaft and a motor right so there have to be some specific reasons why you would need that for later one example is very shallow water or environmentally sensitive waters where rather than having a a boat with a propeller that's you know chopping up mixing up sediment uh chopping up uh plant life sea grasses so forth uh you have something that has a more gentle interaction with the environment so you know in florida they have they lose a few hundred manatees every year from uh from propeller strikes so you can see how um an environmentally sensitive waters that you might uh might say no propeller boats allowed beyond this point beyond that point would have to be a boat that had our undulating fin because it would be harmless to the manatee and you know you can go up against one of these fins whilst actually you can grab it you can bump up against it it just doesn't doesn't do anything to you at all also because we the fin moves large amounts of water slowly as opposed to a rapidly spinning propeller that creates a small jet of water we will be kicking up less sediment there's less concentrated kinetic energy in the wake of our propulsors compared with the propeller so there are some there are some scenarios where you might use it on a surface ship in a submarine there's no reason why it couldn't be scaled up a human carrying submarine there's no reason why it couldn't be scaled up such a submarine would have high maneuverability so there's an analogy not a perfect one that can be made between the fin and a propeller as opposed to a caterpillar track and a wheel um so we get very good traction quote unquote in the water because we have this large surface there we make contact with a large surface area which means that a large vehicle with very large fins would be able to turn very quickly would be able to change direction and move at a fairly high velocity using a large heat effect rather than a spinning uh spinning propeller and so you might see for example like an underwater excavator uh with a human operation underwater excavator with these fins instead of a propeller because you get instantaneous thrust more like a caterpillar track has instant traction where all those wheels that might spin and slip and so forth and uh i may have missed this earlier but the the energy efficiency of this undulating system finn can be greater than that of the traditional propeller correct and if that is the case would there be an energy efficiency application as to why industry would want to shift towards using more of these undulating fins yes that that could be the case so we in a very early test we did of a very early prototype before we built the robot that some of you have seen we found only one uh propeller thruster that was similar in static thrust per watt and since that time we've advanced the fin significantly so it's probably more efficient than any existing propeller for a small propeller you have to keep the scale in mind um in terms of energy efficiency i could could i could foresee energy efficiency being a reason to equip a ship or some other any kind of aquatic vehicle marine vehicle with this thruster but we haven't scaled them up yet so we don't know for certain that a very large undulating fin on a large vehicle would give you the same results we don't have we have we can propose that it would but we don't um we don't have the data yet on that and um looping back to the robot is the robot autonomous is it remotely operated yeah this robot the one that people have seen is is remotely operated it can be remotely operated uh you know wirelessly um through radio connection or through that through a tether the next step and this is what the navy is really looking for the next step is to make it autonomous we have uh when this work starts we anticipate it will start next year with the office level research we would like to do the autonomy all in-house and maybe we could but we're going to team up with mit we have our proposal with the office naval research has a subcontract with mit's autonomy lab because they have some people that are the best in the world at marine autonomy we're going to collaborate with them when the program starts uh most likely next year and we'll have some of the work will be done in-house but we're just going to try to not do everything ourselves to make progress as quick as we can we're going to bring in um some people expertise there's two people in particular two professors that have expertise that's really unmatched so we're going to take advantage of that rather than try to do everything ourselves although we feel like we could do it all ourselves um but we want to try to accelerate the pace and a unique feature of this system is that it can both generate electricity generate its own power as well as move itself so if this robot becomes autonomous is it now able to stay submerged underwater generate its own electricity and not have that need to come up to charge yes that's correct in principle it's one of another of the key advantages of this system and talks back to its origins as an energy harnessing technology so the fins are are good at harnessing flow as well as effectively dissipating energy to create efficient thrust so yes a and i think that's another area of interest that the navy has is persistent presence persistent presence is a is a key topic uh in the navy at the moment so to be able to tether ourselves into flow recharge our own batteries there's some obvious advantages there i will say that there has to be flow so instead and the robot has to be able to tether itself fix itself relative to the flow so obviously river is going to be simple a stream tidal flow is straightforward when you get out into the deep ocean is going to rely on deep ocean currents some of them that can be very fast in some areas of the world but it will need deep ocean currents we've got it to to start generating at about 0.5 meters per second flow of water um and that's a really key advantage that a traditional propeller driven system just doesn't have because these small propeller blades don't have enough surface area to harness enough kinetic energy to move the electric motor in reverse which is know make it into a turbine whereas we have these very large surface areas inherently large surface areas so that gives us a large enough capture area to be able to capture the flow we think about 0.5 meters per second it can start generating electricity so an underwater vehicle with very large propellers could in principle uh have enough surface area for that slow flow of water to recharge its own batteries but very with pillars are impractical for various reasons and they'd also need to propel side by side rotating opposite direction otherwise the propeller is going to spin the vehicle in a flow so the reaction force of the propeller has to have something uh to counter it has to be a reaction force to counter the the uh the rotation of the propeller so you need two propellers like a chinook helicopter in opposite directions for the the vehicle to charge yourself whereas we have a self-reacting mechanism so the fins are reacting against each other rather than against some uh some external fixing point in order to to get the torques to turn the motors charge the batteries and you mentioned deep ocean and actually that brings up an interesting point uh how deep can this robot go can this robot dive down to the actual depths of the ocean yeah so the robot that you've seen is not death rated so it's not going to be going down into the bottom of the sea but it can be made uh that it can be made um deep sea capable and the engineering challenges of deep sea technology are sort of universal there's nothing about our platform that is inherently any easier or harder to make capable of withstanding great depth and the engineering problems around depth are pretty well worked out at this point by the oil gas industry primarily and there is no reason why our system couldn't be made to withstand great depths we haven't done that work yet and another question firstly i'm wondering what all the sensors that the robot is using to understand the world around it and also how is this robot able to localize its position and orientation as it's going through multiple different environments yeah that is a that is a a a good question and we have a whole array of sensors uh and and solutions for how to make that make that happen there are there are many ways to approach it and there's a whole menu of different sensors you can put on at any vehicle like this we share the same challenges as other marine robotic companies in this regard and there are new sensors and new technologies coming out all the time and what the final combination of sensors and software platforms uh is not yet been determined and it changes quite frequently things that we were considering a couple of years ago have now been uh have been superseded by by new technologies are there any that are um not going to change such as uh maybe having a camera in there to record video gyroscope accelerometer yeah the current robot has an accelerometer it has a couple of cameras uh it has a compass um so you know there will be imus there will be a whole variety of sensors in the final uh in the final um final products and as time goes by the the the combination of sensors uh you know will will evolve and will change um we do have to we do want to keep our our weight limit down weight is not a problem in the water but for the amphibious capability too much weight it makes it more difficult for the fins so we are sort of watching as yep you know every few months there's a new sonar that's come out or a small lightweight lidar that's come out so we're looking for compact versions of a lot of these familiar technologies uh as they come out as they roll out as they have been very very uh very rapidly to get as many sensors as we can in a small and lightweight package as we can to make our autonomy uh as effective as it can be autonomy in the deep ocean is challenging because you don't have gps and you have very low bandwidth communication so you can't have data streaming to and from a vehicle that's at any depth at all other than through a cable and there are but there are some new technologies that appear to be close to being released high bandwidth acoustic modems for example they hold a lot of promise we haven't seen them yet but for the most part when you're down in the ocean you're by yourself makes autonomy not only challenging but it makes it very necessary right you can't on land you know driverless car is constantly streaming data to and from other vehicles and to uh whether it's 5g 3g it's got a gps and so forth none of that is available in the ocean so at least below the surface so autonomy is very challenging but also essentially if you want to have a vehicle do anything by itself it has to be very good at doing things by itself where autonomy will come into its own where the real advances in autonomy will be made might well be in undersea applications because you absolutely have to have them down there uh whereas on land you have all these things that can supplement the information that your vehicle has on land because of the ability to transmit signals to it from it and do you view the high bandwidth acoustic modems um first off could you describe a little bit what those exactly are and they view that as being able to potentially solve the problem of not having you know gps specifically available underwater uh i i don't think it solves the problem entirely it enables a human being to interact with the underwater vehicle if you can really have uh high bandwidth acoustic modems um i will say there are people that are skeptical the the higher bandwidth acoustic modems being discussed now are ever going to be what what the researchers claim they're going to be so i'll put that as a caveat but it still won't have gps um unless something on the surface is connected to gps and communicating with a robot that's a way to get gps but the gps signal won't penetrate through the water obviously but you have a station that service communicating with an acoustic modem to the robot um then that's one way to get uh position in the ocean but i i don't know if this technology is really going to materialize in the way that people hope it will also when there's a underwater where you're really in three-dimensional so you don't just need to know where you are two-dimensionally as a land vehicle would but you need to know where you are obviously in terms of the depth you've got the xyz access you need to know where you are in in in every axis which is not the case for for land vehicles that's an extra challenge there are a lot of early autonomous vehicles that have um that have failed because they've hit they've hit the bottom or they've hit there's a sea mountain it's not well mapped and they just go right into the side of it so that's a real that's a real challenge and it's especially challenging the surf zone where the waves are going up and down and the the sand or the beaches just a few inches or a few feet below the vehicle it turns on to um to use sonar at those small depths so you have to use a combination of sensors and clever software for the robot to know what it's doing when it's bouncing up and down waves approaching the shore and that's what we're going to be doing the next round of navy funded r d which we anticipate will start next year all right thank you what are some of your short-term and long-term plans for client well for their robotic development we are we are going to use the funding from the navy to develop a robot for the safe zone amphibious robot and the so-so by working out uh you know there's a mechanical component to that uh and then there's the there's the sensor or software component to that work the work we'll be doing with the navy to develop that amphibious robot capable of shallow water and coastal operations will in the process of doing that we will have a a solid robotic platform that we can use for for other things and with the autonomy work uh our goal is to have a ubiquitously useful autonomous robot aquatic robot and we're also going to be working under that navy program on swarming capability so whatever the navy would like to use our platform for whatever they have in mind they don't usually tell us in any detail why they're interested what specific applications they're going to use the robot for it will the work that will be required to give them what they want will give us a universally useful marine robot that with autonomy and ultimately with swarming capability and now we have something that we can see a whole range of uses for and the one that most interests me is in the field of deep sea ocean mining which is a controversial subject a lot of people are very concerned that mining in the deep ocean is about to begin and we have our robotic uh platform we believe can provide a solution that will will basically eliminate a lot of the fears people have of the environmental damage of ecological damage that's really the that's really the big um the big step for us is something such as environmentally benign deep sea ocean mining and in the process of developing those robotic systems for an application such as deepsea mining we hope to take the next step to having a robot that's mass producible and then we can use them for applications closer to home such as coral reef planting seagrass planting um scalp fishing without trolling scalp fishing is does tremendous amount of environmental damage with the troll nets that drag along the bottom uh to collect the scallops we foresee using swarms of our robots to individually pick up the scallops without harming any of the environment around them place them in a basket be raised to the surface thank you very much for speaking with us today i really want to actually dig into those use cases um a little bit more with you on another episode that we're running a little bit low on time um but thank you very much for coming out very welcome that brings us to the end of this episode but don't despair as always we have plenty more to discover at robohub.org forward slash podcast where you'll also not just find our podcast episodes but a wealth of other tech and robotics news features and videos and if you're a regular listener who enjoys our podcast you can also visit our website to find out more about supporting us through patreon for just a few dollars a month you can become a supporter or patron of the podcast and help us to ensure we can continue to bring you exciting episodes covering cutting-edge research industry developments conferences and events we will be back again with a brand new episode in about two weeks time until then goodbye finns with robohub the podcast for news and views on robotics

Channel: Robohub

Views: 284,909

Keywords:

Id: sTpK1c08ohE

Length: 50min 39sec (3039 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/QualityVote]

Hi! This is our community moderation bot.

---

If this post fits the purpose of /r/Military, UPVOTE this comment!!

If this post does not fit the subreddit, DOWNVOTE This comment!

If this post breaks the rules, DOWNVOTE this comment and REPORT the post!