Interview
Felipe Lima, CEO, USEA Ocean Data
USEA Moves Ahead on Autonomous Ocean Data Initiative
The need to discover and recover masses of information from our oceans is well understood and agreed, a potential boon to business, science and defense. Today there are many individual and coordinated efforts globally to more efficiently, effectively retrieve and distribute data, including an initiative from USEA Ocean Data, a Norwegian start-up that is aiming to leverage advanced autonomy – specifically the seamless pairing of AUVs with USVs – as an exponential multiplier of capability. MTR recently spoke with Felipe Lima, CEO, USEA Ocean Data, and excerpted below and edited for brevity are his insights on his organization’s progress to date and the challenges ahead.
By Greg Trauthwein
The USEA USV with AUVs onboard.
Image courtesy USEAFelipe, what is USEA Ocean Data’s mission?
As you know, the ocean is over more than 70% of our planet's surface, yet it remains mostly unexplored. But we know that [information found within the oceans] hold an important part of the solutions for the challenges facing society today. If the oceans were a country, it would be the seventh largest economy in the world, with a GDP of approximately two and a half trillion euros per year; bigger than Brazil, bigger than Italy. To unlock this endless source of sustainable wealth and solutions, we need ocean data, a lot of ocean data. But data collection using traditional methods is neither sustainable nor efficient, and that's our inspiration in USEA. USEA is one of the pioneers in the ocean data revolution, and our mission is to unlock blue data for a green future.
How did you get involved in this ocean industry?
I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and basically I grew up by the sea: diving, fishing and sailing. I’ve always admired and respected the ocean, and it’s always fascinated me, too. I can say that the ocean has always been part of who I am. After four years in the Brazilian Navy, I left to get my first engineering degree, and I started my career in oil and gas as a subsea engineer. I worked in Subsea 7, Aker Solutions, Xodus Group. That's when I discovered a new passion: marine robotics and subsea survey.
Getting data from the ocean efficiently, effectively is a mandate for many private companies and organizations. How is the USEA approach unique?
There are many interesting solutions emerging, a lot of smart folks with great ideas, and I think all of them can contribute to a better future. USEA made its bet on something that we believe is a game changer, the combination the unbeatable efficiency of autonomous underwater vehicles, AUVs and the cost efficiency, and the inherent safety of unmanned surface vessels, USVs. But we haven't solved just part of the AUV/USV integration, we have gone all the way. Our vessel will operate totally unmanned from day one, able to operate one or multiple AUVs as a mothership. It will operate over the horizon virtually in any weather condition. And it can be at sea also for very long periods, more than a month if necessary. And thanks to our proprietary uLARS, we can also keep recharging AUV batteries and transferring data without recovering the AUVs from a deck. And this enables us to continue the operation even in very rough seas, where everyone else would normally have to stop and wait on weather.
I understand that your organization recently received an approval from the Norwegian Maritime Authority that appears to be instrumental in your quest to create that next step in vessel autonomy. Can you dig a little bit deeper, discussing the hurdle you passed and the challenges ahead?
Over the last five years, we have cracked the technology challenge. That box is ticked. But when we're talking about operating a ship with no one on board, the regulatory challenge is just as big. All the rules, standards, conventions are based on the premise that there is a crew onboard. So the hurdle that we have passed is exactly that. At the end of a very thorough and lengthy evaluation process by the Norwegian Maritime Authority, we have convinced them that our unmanned ship is safe to operate, totally unmanned from day one without any need for transition period. And finally, they had given us the green light to build the vessel.
To date, how much has been invested; what's the source of your funding; and what is your timeline for commercialization?
So far we have focused our energy on solving the technology and the regulatory challenges. We have closed a few investment rounds [with private investors], the first in 2018 to the latest in 2022. [This mixed with public support] amount to approximately 3 million euros.
The next step is to turn our unique technology into a profitable business. So to start delivering to our customers, we need to invest in tangible assets in expanding our workforce and to fund the next step. Then we are looking at the approximately 20 million euros from investors. Our plan is to be fully commercially operational in approximately 24 months.