Bedrock modernizes seafloor mapping with autonomous sub and cloud-based data – TechCrunch

Pressure on renewable energies has put offshore wind power on the agenda of many energy companies, and that requires a close look at the seabed where the plants are to be installed. happily Bedrock is here to drag this mapping process into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater vehicle and modern cloud-based data service.

The company aims to replace the standard “big ship, big sonar” approach with a faster, smarter, more modern service that will allow companies to take regular super-accurate seabed imagery as easily as they could set up some servers to host their website .

“We believe we are the first cloud-native platform for seabed data,” said Anthony DiMare, CEO and co-founder (with CTO Charlie Chiau) of Bedrock. “This is a big data problem – how would you design the systems to support this solution? We’re turning it into a modern data service, rather than a giant naval operation – you’re not tied to that huge piece of infrastructure floating in the water. Everything from the way we move sonars in the ocean to the way we deliver the data to engineers has been rethought. “

The product Bedrock offers customers are high resolution maps of the ocean floor made available through Mosaic, a trusted web service that does all the analysis and hosting for you – a huge step forward for an industry where “ Data migration “still” shipping a “means box with hard drives.”

Normally, DiMare explained, this data would be collected, processed and stored on the ships themselves. Since they were designed for everything from port inspections to deep sea surveys, they couldn’t rely on a decent internet connection, and the data is useless in its raw form. Like any other bulky data, it needs to be visualized and put into context.

Credit: Bedrock

“These data sets are extremely large, several dozen terabytes in size,” DiMare said. “Typical cloud systems are not the best way to manage 20,000 sonar files.”

The current market is more focused on detailed near-shore data than on the deep sea as there is a great demand to participate in the growing wind power market. This means that data is collected much closer to the usual internet infrastructure and can be transferred more easily than before for cloud-based processing and storage. This in turn means that the data can be processed and made available more quickly, just in time for demand to increase.

As DiMare explained, there may have been an ocean floor survey of a potential installation site over the past few decades, but this is only the first step. A first mapping pass could have been made to validate and add details to the year old maps, then another for approval, environmental assessments, engineering, construction and periodic inspections. If this could be achieved with a turnkey automated process that delivers even better results than crewed ships for less money, it will be a huge win for customers who rely on old methods. And, of course, if the industry grows as expected and requires more active monitoring of the seabed along every US coast, that will be a win for Bedrock too.

Credit: Bedrock

To make all of this possible, of course, you need a craft that can collect the data at all. “The AUV is a technology that we developed solely to enable a data product,” DiMare said, but noted that “we didn’t initially want to do this.”

“We started specifying what it was like to use a standard system,” he explained. “But if you want to build a hyper-scalable, very efficient system to get the best cost per square foot, you need a very specific set of features, specific sonars, the compute stack … until we have all of the things we essentially listed had a self-developed system. It is faster, it is more flexible in operation, you get better data quality and can do this more reliably. “

And amazingly, it doesn’t even need a boat – you can take it from the back of a van and launch it from a pier or beach.

“From the start, one of the restrictions we placed on ourselves was ‘no boats’. And we have to be able to fly with this thing. That completely changed our approach, ”said DiMare.

Credit: Bedrock

The AUV packs a lot into a small package, and while the sensor load is variable depending on the job, one aspect that defines the vehicle is its high-frequency sonar.

Sonars operate over a wide range of frequencies, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of Hertz. Unfortunately, this means that marine life, many of which can be heard in this area, becomes inundated with background noise, sometimes to the point where it is harmful or prevents them from entering an area. Sonar operating at 200 kHz is safe for animals, but the high frequency means that the signal is attenuated faster, reducing the range to 50-75 meters.

Obviously, this is worthless to a ship floating on the surface – much of what it has to map is more than 75 meters deep. But if you could build a vehicle that always stayed within 50 meters of the ocean floor, it has many advantages. And this is exactly what the Bedrock AUV was developed for.

The increased frequency of the sonar also means more detail, so the image of its instruments is better than what you would get with a larger wave. And because it is safe to use around animals, you can skip the (very necessary but time consuming) bureaucracy with wildlife authorities. Better, faster, cheaper, and safer is a hell.

Today is the official launch of Mosaic, and to encourage adoption, Bedrock is offering 50 gig of free storage space for any type of compatible card data, as the platform is format-independent.

There is a lot of data that is technically “public” but is still very difficult to find and use. It could be a poorly detailed survey from two decades ago, or a hyperspecific scan of an area studied by a research group, but if everything were in one place it would likely be a lot more useful, DiMare said.

“Ultimately, we want to get to the point where we can reach the whole ocean on an annual basis,” he concluded. “So we have a lot to do.”