SEA SENTINEL
BIONIC UNMANNED UNDERWATER VEHICLES FROM NOA MARINE Michał Latacz – Chief Engineer & CEO, NOA MARINE
NOA Marine implements the use of renewable energy to power unmanned bionic underwater vehicles. The Sea Sentinel vehicles come both in tethered and untethered configuration, collecting chemical, acoustic, and visual data, and conducting uninterrupted observation with high resolution measurements for 300 days a year.
INSPIRED BY NATURE The future of ocean exploration and infrastructure maintenance belongs to autonomous vehicles; hence the goal was to build efficient units capable of safe and long periods of unsupervised service, powered purely by a renewable source of energy. Applied biomimetics was one of the passions shared by the NOA Marine team, and we as engineers were driven by mechanical and physical solutions that Mother Nature has developed over millions of years. Clearly those remain well ahead of contemporary human technology. Inspired by the beautiful and elegant way cephalopods swim, we noticed that the propulsion system of those animals is completely different from that used by man-made structures. The struggle for survival forces evolution to adopt the best possible optimisation; a creature that would be ineffective couldn’t survive. This inspired us to study the wave drive propulsion aiming to find a more efficient manner of movement. In addition, the wave drive propulsion – aside from being highly efficient, gives amazing manoeuvring possibilities that cannot be offered by traditional solutions. In 2016 we founded NOA to develop and bring technologies to the marine market. Initially we aimed to become a UUV manufacturer, but along the way we found that there was vast potential for becoming a robotics-as-a-service provider: servicing clients purely with data they need, instead of offering them tools to collect said data. Today we build
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UUV solutions that include hulls, power systems, battery management, propulsion, control software, and integrate third party solutions for navigation, positioning, and missionspecific sensorics. The Sea Sentinel vehicles are part of a much larger and scalable system. While testing and working at sea with our vehicles, we are also engaged in developing a fully autonomous platform for the collection of oceanographic data; one that’s able to work for up to 6 months without human intervention on-site. It would allow automatic docking of unmanned Sea Sentinel vehicles, wireless data transfer, and recharging of green energy generated in the station from solar, wind, and wave energy. Our, industrial grade, biomimetic, underwater propulsion system constitutes a new class of underwater robots and provides exceptional capabilities, such as high static thrust, long range, unmatched energy efficiency, and up to 100kg sensor payload capacity per vehicle, with silent work so the systems do not stress aquatic animals.
RENEWABLE ENERGY POWERED DRIVE One of the key challenges was to develop and introduce a vehicle that is energy efficient to a level that allows recharging purely with renewable energy generated on-site. Also, our goal was to make a wave drive that was robust, failsafe, and resistant to damage, making it applicable in demanding multi-day missions. That is how we came up with the biomimetic NOA Drive that is propelling our UUVs.
