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Andrea Cohen, MIT Sea Grant
The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Odyssey has voyaged
around the world: to the Arctic and the Antarctic, the Labrador
Sea, the Mediterranean, and New Zealand's Kaikoura Canyon.
But one of Odyssey's most important journeys was from the
MIT Sea Grant AUV Lab to the headquarters of Bluefin Robotics
Corp.—a distance of roughly half a mile.
Located across the street from the Cambridgeport Saloon, in
an old auto parts building, Bluefin is the small start-up
company that licensed the technology developed at the AUV
Lab. That technology transfer is a critical component of bringing
the lab's pioneering vehicles into the marketplace—and
into the oceans.
Back in 1990 when the Lab got its start, AUVs were large,
multi million-dollar contraptions. But MIT Sea Grant director
Chrys Chryssostomidis envisioned something different: sleek,
economic robotic subs that would dive 6,000 meters and be
readily lifted by two people (of average academic build).
Within two years, AUV Lab manager Jim Bellingham and his colleagues
had come up with Odyssey, a vehicle whose progeny have helped
revolutionize the range and scope of AUVs.
But commercializing even the best technology is a tricky proposition,
explains Frank van Mierlo, Bluefin's commercial manager. "You
can only transfer technology if you transfer people,"
he says. "In most success stories that means that people
transfer out of academia. But academics don't always want
to go into industry, and very often they aren't the right
people to start up a new company."
The alternative is to transfer industry people into an academic
setting, and then transfer them back out into industry. This,
says van Mierlo, has been the key to Bluefin's success thus
far. "Chrys had the vision to bring people into the AUV
Lab who could begin the transfer process," says van Mierlo,
who spent two years as a research engineer with the Lab. "Those
people then went into the company. It's a good model for MIT
because the Institute doesn't want to lose its researchers."
According to van Mierlo, Bluefin's seven orders and its profitability
set it apart in the AUV industry. "We've been profitable
from the beginning and we have more than $3 million in order
backlog right now," he notes. Those orders, from the
Navy, The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, WHOI, and U.K.-based
Racal Survey Group Ltd., came after intensive work to discern
the needs of both commercial and scientific sectors.
Bellingham, who now works part-time at the Monterey Bay Aquarium
Bay Research Institute and is technical director at Bluefin,
notes that scientists in academia with limited budgets will
often go to sea with systems that require tweaking. The time
spent perfecting the system in the field is a cost-effective
means of arriving at a satisfactory system.
However, in the oil and gas industry, a system must work as
soon as it gets into the field. For instance, if an oil company
is surveying the seafloor before spending hundreds of millions
of dollars to erect an underwater platform, it needs reliable
survey instruments that won't hold up a schedule.
Until recently, oil companies have used remotely operated
vehicles (ROVs), towed behind ships, to survey areas with
side-scan sonar, multibeam echo sounders and sub-bottom profilers.
Such critical surveys ensure that the sea floor is stable,
and that gas pockets or avalanche-prone regions won't jeopardize
costly equipment.
However, such ROV work is expensive at great depths. AUVs,
on the other hand, can be equipped with the necessary instruments
and complete their tasks at a fraction of the cost. Racal
has ordered two AUVs that it plans to use for shallow and
deep water surveys for the oil and gas industry, cable inspection,
dredging, alluvial mining, and military applications.
Bluefin has already delivered one AUV to Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Bluefin has also developed two AUVs for the Navy, which plans
to use them to search for mines. According to Bellingham,
the 1991 war with Iraq showed that "very simple mines
almost brought oil shipping to a standstill. The Navy didn't
have the techniques needed to find and clear those mines."
With the new AUVs, they will be able to hunt down mines via
broad area surveys of shallow water regions.
Bluefin is building a vehicle for a project led by WHOI researcher
Robert Sohn. In that effort, the AUV will be deployed by an
icebreaker in the Arctic to collect seismology data from the
ocean floor.
While Bluefin's engineers busily work on filling their orders,
the AUV Lab is focusing on developing new research, using
AUVs for fisheries and educational purposes. "We're pushing
out operations to Bluefin and keeping the core research capability
within Sea Grant," says Chryssostomidis. "MIT's
philosophy is that you help an idea grow and then once it
reaches a certain level of maturity, you want it to go out
and stand on its own. This is very important because our primary
mission is to educate students and provide research opportunities."
And undergraduates, he adds, are forever fascinated by robots.
May 10, 2000
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