A start-up is developing underwater drones to map the seas, scanning the ocean for anything from oil to pollution to contraband

THE planet’s surface is more than 70 per cent water. Yet we know more about the moon than we do about what’s going on in the deep oceans. A Massachusetts start-up has a ball-sized robot it wants to fix that.

Meet EVE – the Ellipsoidal Vehicle for Exploration – a sensor-studded yellow robot the shape of a pumpkin. EVE’s creator Sampriti Bhattacharyya, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a grand mission in mind for a swarm of EVEs: she wants to build Google Maps for the ocean.

“We do not yet have a very cheap, scalable, easily deployable method of scanning large areas of the ocean,” says Bhattacharyya, who founded her company Hydroswarm to commercialise EVE and do exactly that. The start-up is one of 26 finalists for the MassChallenge Awards, which will select winners at the end of the month to receive a share of $1.5 million in grants. These awards are designed to help fledgling start-ups get off the ground.


Existing ocean-going robots are remotely operated, but EVE is autonomous, making it cheaper and more feasible to use swarms of them to search large areas. “With a swarm you can get faster coverage of a big area,” says Yogesh Girdhar of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Such a network of autonomous drones could be used for disaster response, coral reef monitoring, surveillance for port security and finding places to drill for oil and gas. Bhattacharyya says EVE would have been useful for monitoring pollution from the BP oil spill. Its elliptical frame can be fitted with the right sensors for its mission, such as environmental sensors to monitor pH changes. A swarm of them could be used to look for missing aircraft by fitting the robots with acoustic sensors to listen for pings from a downed jet’s black box.

“It can be operated as a single drone or as a kind of sensor network,” Bhattacharyya says.

Mapping the ocean is difficult. “Underwater, if two robots are talking to each other, they pollute the entire sound channel,” says Girdhar. “That means everybody else on the network has to stay quiet.” And he says EVE is probably too small for some sensors, such as those that measure ocean current. It’s also tricky to do real-time video processing underwater. “These are all challenges, but they’re all solvable theoretically,” Girdhar says.

Another challenge is battery life: one charge currently lasts EVE only two and a half hours, so the length of its expeditions is limited.

Bhattacharyya says the robots will be in operation very soon.

“I think autonomous robots right now are most needed underwater”, rather than in aerial or land environments, says Girdhar. “Hopefully these kinds of start-ups will bridge that gap. I think the future is small robots, and a lot of them.”

“Autonomous robots are most needed underwater. The future is small robots, and a lot of them”

(Image: Hydroswarm)

This article appeared in print under the headline “Robots of the Caribbean”