A flash of fiery reddish orange caught my eye as I was speed-walking through WEST 2024, the Navy’s annual IT conference: what looked like a cute little drone boat a tad bigger than a toddler’s walker, and some matching red-orange baubles.
Francisco Bustamante, EvoLogics’ director of operations and sales, explained that it was a suite of tech, including a surface drone and nodes to build a WiFi network underwater.
D1: This is a data network that uses audio?
BUSTAMANTE: We started working with different products for underwater data transmission. That was one of the key technologies that we developed because there was basically no solution. Wi-Fi doesn’t work. You can use optical systems, but they are also limited to the turbidity. So for any long-range communication, you need acoustic systems.
You can use this as a technology to enable the operation of unmanned underwater vehicles, or even for manned vehicles…to position them underwater, and to transmit data to the surface.
Now that we have these enabling technologies, we have moved to other concepts. We are developing autonomous vehicles for different survey applications. We started with a survey vehicle for the surface, which is a sonar boat. It can perform different missions depending on what payload sensors that it has. We have single-beam and multi-beam echo sounders for water depth. And we have front-looking sonar and sidescan sonar to do, basically, object detection.
The object detection we have included technologies with AI. In order to automate, we work with pre-trained datasets. And then the vehicle can look specifically for certain types of objects, for example, in assisting a police force looking for missing persons in water bodies or for finding mines in shallow waters, coastal areas, and so on.
