Autonomous boats play an increasingly important role in understanding and protecting our oceans. They are able to collect a wealth of research data to monitor the state of our oceans as well as the aquatic life within it that would otherwise be impossible to collect due to the cost, challenging conditions, and long duration of the project. This industry is just in its infancy, like self-driving cars and drones, and there are tremendous opportunities for autonomous boats in a variety of applications.

Synapse Autonomous Hydro Drone

Hydrographic and bathymetric surveys measure and detail features of the coastline and seabed that is critical to maritime navigation, marine construction, dredging, offshore oil exploration/offshore oil drilling and related activities. Ships using sonar travel along the area of interest, gathering information about what is on the ocean's floor. Using crewed ships can be a very laborious, costly and time intensive process, as ships need to travel along the area of interest in a grid-like manner to adequately map the desired area.

There is a growing use of autonomous boats for this kind of work, in the ocean environment as well as in lakes, sewage treatment plants, rivers, mines and harbours. In the Bering Sea, the NOAA used AVS Global's autonomous boat the C-Worker 5 to map the seabed. Autonomous battery powered boats such as Seafloor's HyDrone ASV or EchoBoat-ASV are designed for a various of hydrographic survey applications with a range of sensors.

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