Tracking an unmanned, solar-powered boat as it passes Wake Island in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from anyone who built it, has an almost surreal quality. When Seasats, a San Diego-based maritime company, sent one of its Lightfish autonomous surface vessels from California toward Japan last year, anyone with a browser could watch the entire event in real time. The ship was 350 pounds in weight. It measured twelve feet in length. It traveled over 7,500 miles in 150 days. No human ever set foot on it.
The Lightfish can run for months without going back to port, is solar-powered, and is small enough to be launched from the back of a pickup truck. When science fiction depicts robotic ocean exploration, it is not the sleek, futuristic craft. To be honest, it appears more like a very dedicated buoy. However, it is difficult to dispute the performance record it is establishing.
The Pacific crossing began at Seasats’ San Diego headquarters, made a stop in Hawaii for a demonstration, traveled past Wake Island and Guam, took part in another demonstration off Okinawa, and finally touched down on mainland Japan. Real-time boat health metrics, live camera footage, and nearby vessel monitoring via AIS were all publicly available during the entire transit. Fish swimming alongside the hull were once visible to viewers of the feed. Even from a screen in California, that particular detail speaks volumes about the intimacy this technology fosters with the ocean.
The public tracking page was a conscious decision to depart from an industry culture that prioritizes presentations over transparency, according to Max Kramers, co-founder and head of vehicle design at Seasats. “We wanted to show real data instead of just PowerPoints.” When you take into account how frequently announcements about defense and maritime technology are accompanied by carefully chosen metrics and carefully controlled imagery, that statement takes on a different meaning. In this case, the data was simply lying around, open to anybody.
These kinds of capabilities have drawn attention from the scientific community for reasons that go beyond novelty. A proposal for a global network of unmanned surface vehicles to monitor the ocean-atmosphere boundary was published in Frontiers in Marine Sciences earlier this year by an international team of more than fifty researchers, including scientists from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The argument is simple: weather is created, carbon dioxide is absorbed, and storms gain or lose energy on the sea surface. Additionally, it is among the areas on Earth with the least amount of monitoring.
According to Sarah Gille, a physical oceanographer at Scripps who co-authored the study, “the weather that disrupts our lives and waters our crops often originates from interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean.” There are gaps in all of the current instruments, including crewed research ships, fixed buoys, and satellites. Small-scale dynamics are missed by satellites. Ships are costly, logistically challenging, and hazardous in harsh environments. The network of about 4,000 drifting robotic instruments known as Argo floats, which revolutionized interior ocean monitoring, does not concentrate on the surface. This creates a data gap that is starting to appear more expensive, especially since climate models require inputs with higher resolution.
The Lightfish and other unmanned surface vehicles are capable of transmitting data in almost real time, operating through storms that would keep a research vessel in port, and measuring dozens of variables at once. The director of Scripps’ Air-Sea Interaction Research Laboratory, Luc Lenain, has been using a different class of USV called Wave Gliders, which propel themselves using wave energy. He has observed that the smaller physical profile of these vehicles actually enhances data quality. Measurements of wind and waves are hampered by large ships. It turns out that the robots are more adept at listening.
Since then, Seasats has advanced. The first autonomous transit of the Taiwan Strait, a disputed waterway, was completed by a Lightfish in May of this year. During the transit, it tracked Chinese warships that were not using active AIS transponders and took pictures of their location and type. The stakes were significantly increased by that mission. Deployed hundreds of miles away, the same platform that carried scientific sensors across open water was now surreptitiously gathering intelligence in one of the world’s most tense maritime corridors. Although the overlap is hard to overlook, it is still unclear if that dual-use trajectory will make the scientific community’s case for a global civilian observing network more difficult.
The quiet momentum that is developing around these cars is more difficult to ignore. The technology is not particularly striking to look at. However, a 350-pound solar robot that crossed the Pacific twice while being tracked in real time from a laptop in California is exactly the kind of unglamorous milestone that often seems like the start of something big years later.
