Beyond the sea - transforming an extreme market is hard. Nauticus Robotics CEO dives into how it can be done

Extreme environments are one of the most promising applications of robotics and AI: locations that are dangerous or lethal for humans. They include space, deep mining, offshore engineering, and nuclear decommissioning. Developing secure, reliable, trustworthy, and standards-based technologies that can operate safely in such locations promises to save lives, time, and money, while heralding new commercial opportunities.

One of the most hazardous environments covers 70% of the Earth’s surface: the sea. Subsea inspection, engineering, and maintenance are both dangerous and expensive: sending out a ship full of maritime engineers and divers in all weathers might cost $100,000 or more a day, perhaps to carry out a single task, such as turning a valve on a pipeline.

So, it is not for nothing that the value of the ocean economy is estimated at $2.5 trillion a year, by some analysts: were the sea a nation, it would be comfortably in the top ten in terms of nominal GDP.

Offshore wind will be a critical sector, with sea-based turbines poised to become the world’s number one power source by 2050, some believe. Whatever their contribution to the energy sector may turn out to be, maintaining those installations will be vital, with both airborne and subsea robots being a significant element of the mix.

When Nauticus Robotics launched in 2014, its vision was to be an Uber of the sea, with fleets of on-demand, autonomous service robots stationed around the coast, obviating the need for clients to pay big money for scarcity and inertia.

Then known as Houston Mechatronics – the name change and IPO were in 2021-22, via a merger with Special Purpose Acqusition Company (SPAC), CleanTech – Nauticus was founded by ex-NASA engineers. This was hardly surprising, given that the high-risk deep-sea and deep-space environments share many of the same challenges, including communication barriers.

Just as planetary distances, such as from Earth to Mars, create a significant timelag due to that universal limit, the speed of light, real-time subsea communication between humans and robots is a barrier too, as radio waves propagate poorly in salt water. Supervised autonomy is critical in both environments, therefore: without it, subsea robots are forced to operate tethered to boats as Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which can limit their movements and scope.

All this opportunity led Nauticus Robotics to launch its flagship Aquanaut subsea robot – an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) – soon after foundation. The compact, orange, self-contained machine is about the size of a ‘hot hatchback’ car, yet it can travel fast and autonomously underwater.

Version 1 could open out and transform into an almost humanoid, ROV-style robot that could carry out supervised maintenance operations, via a head full of sensors and lights and a pair of actuated arms that all unfolded from inside the machine.

When I saw that version of Aquanaut in 2019 at the company’s facility in Houston – on the other side of town from NASA’s Johnson Space Center – it was already an impressive innovation. In a report at the time for Innovate UK, I noted:

In AUV mode, Aquanaut can cover up to 200km (108 nautical miles) in a single mission, while performing tasks like seabed mapping and infrastructure inspection. It transforms into a tether-less robot in a single motion to carry out advanced subsea operations with just a few mouse clicks. In this sense, the company is selling the ability to turn an undersea valve, rather than focusing on selling the robot itself.

This was an important distinction, because like all good robot companies today, Nauticus Robotics is all about identifying and selling the service, not the robot. Its original Uber-like vision of fleets of AUVs ready for dispatch to offshore platforms, subsea pipelines, or maritime disasters was both exciting and logical, therefore, especially in markets where customers were paying huge premiums for inertia in the form of massive, crewed ships.

When the real world intervenes

But it was also where a bold robotics idea collided with the intransigence and complexity of the real world. Some obstacles were technical, as I noted in my report:

[One challenge] is two-way communications with a tether-less undersea robot. Accordingly, the company has created a bespoke data compression/decompression algorithm for point-cloud images, allowing them to be transmitted over an acoustic modem. This enables the robot to represent complex visual/sensor information to operators from minimal data.

But other problems proved harder for an ambitious start-up to crack. For example, some markets are built on inertia via aggressive, entrenched providers of expensive, high-value services. Those highly capitalised incumbents will naturally resist the influx of any Uber-style service model far more effectively than the personal transport sector has done.

After all, sending a massive ship holding a submersible full of expert engineers is not like hailing a taxi. And this broad problem stands in the way of all forms of ocean autonomy, such as autonomous cargo and passenger ships: the market simply doesn’t like that scale of disruption. Too many jobs and established businesses are under threat, including entire local economies.

When it debuted recently, Version 2 of Aquanaut appeared to acknowledge the real-world challenges of the maritime and subsea engineering sectors, with more of a focus of launching the robot from ships, rather than from coastal stations – implicitly working with the industry, rather than seeking wholesale transformation of it from outside.

Also gone was the core transformation of the robot itself: Version 2 of Aquanaut offers a sleeker, simpler, more integrated design that can move faster and deeper, getting its sensors, cameras and arms to where they need to go, with a minimum of added complexity.

This, then, is the recurring reality of the robotics sector: an exciting vision of a real-life Transformer and an Uber-like market – seamlessly changing itself and the market’s slow-moving economics – rapidly replaced with something that offers a simpler, well-engineered solution that works within existing structures.

Nauticus is still solving real problems, you see, but without wholesale transformation. In other words, the real world has transformed both the company and the robot, not the other way around. As my Innovate UK report predicted back in 2019, with reference to the Blue Tech (maritime technology) sector:

The service becomes focused on the intelligence and adaptability that robots can offer the customer. In some instances, the AI and data can be decoupled and sold as a service to specialist hardware companies.

However, traditional service providers will try to protect the income streams that come from expensive, locked-in processes, a challenge that can be seen as analogous to market tensions over Uber and other disruptive digital service providers on land.

Also different from my 2019 visit is President and CEO John Gibson, who took over from Nick Radford in 2024, with a view to putting the company on a more secure financial footing. Significantly, Gibson comes from within the company’s target client, the energy sector, and so understands how it operates, with stints at Gulf, Halliburton, Chevron, and Flotek Industries.

In a fireside chat with analysts recently, Gibson was asked how Nauticus Robotics, as a small, ambitious, and recently refinanced operation, saw itself competing with the giants of the Blue Tech and subsea engineering sectors, such as Oceaneering. His pitch:

When you're public and you're small, everything you do can be scrutinized. And so, we've got a lot of attention on us. If you're part of a large company, these are all venture capital efforts inside our competitors, too, right? They're very small divisions in those companies fighting for scarce resource. So, they're trying to get funding as well. They're just doing that funding internally, as opposed to us doing it through the market. 

“So, I think they're just as challenged to get all the money they need to create a new product line that, in many ways, also has the innovator's dilemma problem. They really are focused on their installed bases, and so, they’re looking at cannibalizing their installed base with the new generation of technology. I've been there and done that. And it’s really difficult, right? You have to fight for funding when you're running those divisions and those companies.

They are tremendous names, he noted: 

You know you're in the right space when your largest competitors are doing something that's similar to what you do. And so, if they're having to invest in this, then you know that our investment is prudent because they know this is the future. So, all we have to do is just stay ahead of them.  And it's such a small and emerging market that we probably have less today than 0.5% of the underwater drones that are needed to really make this industry more efficient. We've got a large market share within that 0.5%, but there are hundreds of vehicles to be built over the next decade, thousands to replace how we do ROVs today. We need more data and more observation, not less.

“The sensorification of the ocean is underway, gathering the data from the sensors, gathering more information about the health of coral reefs, leak detection. These are things where we've done okay. But I think we're going to continue to get better and better so that we know the impact on the oceans of our activities. And I think this is the perfect place for autonomy and untethered vehicles to add to the marketplace, as well as defense.

As for the Aquanaut itself, that's a work in progress: 

We're training missions. We're taking it from being a tech to having workflows that are built into the vehicle that we can just click on it, and they'll perform that workflow. And this is a huge game changer in terms of our company and how work is done. It's not just a camera on a stick at the bottom of the ocean. It literally is a fully autonomous robot that is serving a purpose, and we know the exact value of what is being gathered.

Also new is Nauticus Robotics’ $50 million strategic partnership with the UAE, via Emirates-based Master Investment Group (MIG). According to Gibson: 

They felt they could bring a manufacturing facility and capabilities, and access to engineering and equipment there that would allow us to manufacture additional Aquanauts. The goal of manufacturing ten there was our first objective. You need some scale and scope on the ordering of motors and priority with vendors of the components that we use. We wanted to have enough orders that we got pricing associated with volume as opposed to one at a time. We also wanted to get a priority with those vendors as well, including battery vendors. 

All these things are in short supply, so you want to move up the queue, and ten puts you really far up in the queue when you start looking at ordering the components. Hence the reason for the $50 million. […] Their promise to us was that we would work towards a joint effort, that had us with the manufacturing facility set up, staffed, and ready to go to produce ten aquanauts. After that, we'd hope to be able to produce that many or more a year.

My take

But since then, of course, the real world has intervened yet again, of course, in the form of a very different kind of war for the future: the conflict in the Middle East.

As Gibson puts it, that's having an impact on plans for an investor day event:

We had plans to do one here pretty quick, but we are sort of re-thinking that. I'd love to have our new investment group, MIG, join us [at it]. But it's a little difficult getting in and out of the UAE at the moment.