Drones take on the waves: Saildrones get data where people can't

Enlarge / A Voyager class saildrone. saildrone

Sci-fi often paints a terrifying picture of the future: think of aliens decimating humanity, a la War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becomes the present can be pretty amazing - who doesn't love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?

Or take Earth's oceans, which are currently in the midst of a technological revolution that, outside of some very cheesy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.

"We are on the cusp of a proliferation of many autonomous vehicles in the ocean," said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Alaska Fisheries Science Center. "Things that were science fiction not so long ago have become routine now." This includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard carbon fiber sail (called a wing) and a supply of scientific equipment.

hovering over

Saildrones are sailboat-like unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) that travel the oceans using wind and solar power, although larger versions have a backup diesel engine. Remote pilots who work for Saildrone (the company, capitalized) can guide a saildrone (the USV, capitalized) via satellite-communicated commands, which provide a designated path, called a corridor, to a point of target path. The drone's software autonomously adjusts the wing to keep it on track (pilots cannot take direct control of this hardware). Using only wind and ocean currents, sailboats average around 3 knots, or around 3.5 mph.

NOAA and other science teams are asking Saildrone to deploy these rambling USVs in all of Earth's oceans. Saildrones serve as mobile weather stations, biological monitoring devices, and even ocean floor mappers, all without the need for people on board. They can survive terrifyingly high waves, hurricane-force winds and ice-strewn seas, and they can stay out for months at a time.

"The ocean covers 70% of the world, [but] when you think about the actual volume, we know very little about it," said Noah Lawrence-Slavas, an engineer at Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in the NOAA. The Saildrones could provide answers.

drone at sea

Saildrone offers its craft in three sizes. The Explorer is the little workhorse - a 23-foot-long wind-powered vehicle that can sail the seas for a year at a time. With arrays of sensors powered by solar panels, it can monitor ocean weather and chemistry, track fish, and/or measure carbon dioxide at the ocean-atmosphere interface. The 33-foot-long Voyager is equipped with diesel power to supplement wind and solar power. It can map the ocean floor to a depth of 300 meters and it is used for maritime security. The longest and largest option, the Surveyor, was designed for mapping ocean depths, down to 7,000 meters. The first Surveyor was 72 feet long, but the new vehicles will be 65 feet long.

The Voyager and Surveyor have fewer sensor options as their payloads are optimized for mapping and maritime security, but the Explorer can have between 15 and 20 sensors, configured in a customizable package for customers, said Matt Womble, director of ocean data programs. at Saildrone.

A Surveyor- class drone. saildrone

This type of customization wasn't always an option. Just over a decade ago, Lawrence-Slavas recalled, PMEL began exploring ways to replace or supplement ship-based observations, in part because ships are incredibly expensive. In 2014, Saildrone reached out to give a presentation on its concept vehicle's successful trip from the San Francisco Bay Area to Hawaii, he said. Self-sufficient crossing of a substantial amount of ocean piqued PMEL's interest, but there was still a big gap in utility.

"They had a vehicle, but the vehicle didn't measure anything," Lawrence-Slavas said. "[PMEL is unique because] we c...