2 former Navy SEALs are using robot submarines to build ‘Google Earth’ for the oceanAustin-based startup Terradepth aims to map the ocean floor and its environments with thousands of autonomous robotic submarines.
There’s a whole lot of room for modern technology to come in and disrupt the world of ocean exploration and the industry of ocean surveys.”That vision has since blossomed into Austin-based Terradepth, a data service company that has developed a new type of robotic submarine to autonomously map the ocean and its varied environments.
The big question was, is this thing going to be able to do its job without human intervention, because no one’s ever really done that to the degree that we’re trying to do it.”Before founding their startup in 2018, the entrepreneurs ran their idea by the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wolfel and Kauffman see Terradepth as a complement to existing ocean mapping and exploration initiatives, such as those conducted by NASA, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO Seabed 2030 Project, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s Seafloor Mapping Lab, which assisted in the probe’s sensor development.