Startups

Bedrock- A startup is betting on self-driving underwater vehicles to map the seafloor up to ten times faster than current methods

• ByStartupStory     |    October 25, 2022

The United States is racing to increase its production of offshore wind turbines. However, what lies beneath the ocean may stymie those efforts. The Biden administration set a lofty goal of producing 30 gigatonnes of offshore wind energy by 2030 in spring 2021. This, combined with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a 30% tax credit for offshore wind developers who break ground before the beginning of 2026, has resulted in the development of more than 20 new projects along the United States’ Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the Gulf of Mexico.

DiMare’s team could use Bedrock to fly one of their electric autonomous underwater vehicles to a survey location in less than 24 hours. The vehicles developed by the startup operate entirely beneath the ocean’s surface and can submerge up to 300 metres, eliminating the risk of weather delays. Its vehicles also have smaller, higher-frequency sonars than the vessels currently in use, which means its AUVs can operate without a permit because they pose no threat to marine life, according to DiMare.

According to the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, an international collaboration aimed at producing a complete map of the world’s seafloor by 2030, only 23.4% of the ocean’s floor has been mapped. The project, which received formal US participation in June, brings together more than 40 international organisations and networks from 50 countries to collect critical seabed data. Mosaic, Bedrock’s cloud platform, is one of them. Users from all over the world can use it to access free and publicly available seafloor data.

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