Ulysses sells its base underwater vehicle to navies for as little as $50,000, against about $5m for the common US Navy vehicle.
Will O'Brien says robots will do a growing share of the world's work, so Ulysses started with seagrass restoration because seagrass holds 20% of ocean carbon while covering 2% of the seafloor.
Ulysses plans to bring vehicle hardware in house and build on consumer electronics and drone supply chains, since about 20m aerial drones are built each year against perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones.
Ulysses bets cheap drone-built robots can open the ocean
Ulysses is betting that the ocean, where over 75% of the sea has no eyes on it, can be worked by cheap autonomous robots built on consumer drone supply chains. Underwater vehicles are scarce and costly today, so cutting price by orders of magnitude opens work from mine countermeasures to seagrass restoration. Navies and other government buyers provide early revenue while the company pulls key hardware in house.
Takeaways
Ulysses targets a hundredfold cut in vehicle cost. The base underwater vehicle can sell to navies for as little as $50,000, against about $5m for the common US Navy vehicle. Surface vehicles cost under a million dollars. Collison describes the goal as two orders of magnitude.
Drone supply chains make underwater robots affordable. About 20m aerial drones are built each year against perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 underwater ones. The first vehicle used roughly 80% off-the-shelf parts. Generation five brings sonar and inertial navigation in house, which Sacca compares to SpaceX and Tesla.
A surface ship carries and connects the underwater robot. Leviathan, an autonomous surface vehicle with a 2,000 nautical mile range, carries Mako, recharges it and links it to Starlink. Mako is modular, built for physical manipulation, works to 1,500 metres and was crush tested to 2,200.
Weak underwater communication forces onboard autonomy. Acoustic links carry about 10 kilobytes per second over five kilometres, which O'Brien calls the hardest problem. Most processing therefore runs on the vehicle, which has about 100 times more onboard compute than other autonomous underwater vehicles.
Seagrass restoration was the founding mission. Ulysses began three years ago on the view that robots will do more of the world's work. Seagrass covers 2% of the sea floor but holds 20% of ocean carbon, and about 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on it. Restoration runs 100 to 1,000 times slower than loss.
Defense and offshore wind supply the first contracts. Ulysses won its first US Navy contract last year, for mine countermeasures. It also has an offshore wind contract in California to monitor power cables and cut fishing lines that snag them. It sells vehicles mainly to navies.
Government sales cycles are slow but dependable. Collison warns that long procurement cycles can leave a company out of cash before the buyer finishes buying. O'Brien and Sacca answer that government contracts are sticky and bankable once won, and that the Department of Defense is a consistent buyer.
Guinness as an overlooked innovator
O'Brien says Guinness ran an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s.
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On this episode 3
Show 1
A Guinness statistician published his small-sample work under the pseudonym Student, which is why the student's t test has that name. The pseudonym kept rivals such as Anheuser-Busch and Heineken from learning that Guinness hired researchers.
Project Acorn in the 1980s was an effort to make Guinness at home. Its original name, Project Dynamite, was dropped because parcels marked dynamite shipped between London and Dublin would have caused concern.
The widget was voted above the Internet in a 1990s list of the top 100 inventions of the twentieth century, and Guinness has won more Cannes Lion awards than nearly any other company.