The push for renewable vitality has introduced offshore wind energy to the forefront of many an vitality firm’s agenda, and which means taking a really shut have a look at the ocean flooring the place the installations are to go. Fortunately Bedrock is right here to tug that mapping course of into the 21st century with its autonomous underwater car and trendy cloud-based knowledge service.
The firm goals to switch the usual “big ship with a big sonar” method with a quicker, smarter, extra trendy service, letting firms spin up common super-accurate seafloor imagery as simply as they may spin up a couple of servers to host their web site.
“We believe we’re the first cloud-native platform for seafloor data,” mentioned Anthony DiMare, CEO and cofounder (with CTO Charlie Chiau) of Bedrock. “This is a big data problem — how would you design the systems to support that solution? We make it a modern data service, instead of like a huge marine operation — you’re not tied to this massive piece of infrastructure floating in the water. Everything from the way we move sonars around the ocean to the way we deliver the data to engineers has been rethought.”

The product Bedrock offers clients is high-resolution maps of the seafloor, made accessible through Mosaic, a well-recognized net service that does all of the evaluation and internet hosting for you — an enormous step ahead for an trade the place “data migration” nonetheless means “shipping a box of hard drives.”
Normally, DiMare defined, this knowledge was collected, processed, and saved on the ships themselves. Since they have been designed to do every little thing from harbor inspections to deep sea surveys, they couldn’t depend on having a good web connection, and the information is ineffective in its uncooked kind. Like another cumbersome knowledge, it must be visualized and put in context.
Image Credits: Bedrock
“These datasets are extremely large, tens of terabytes in size,” mentioned DiMare. “Typical cloud systems aren’t the best way to manage 20,000 sonar files.”
The present market is extra targeted on detailed, near-shore knowledge than the deep sea, since there’s a crush to participate within the rising wind vitality market. This signifies that knowledge is collected a lot nearer to odd web infrastructure and might be handed off for cloud-based processing and storage extra simply than earlier than. That in flip means the information might be processed and supplied quicker, simply in time for demand to take off.
As DiMare defined, whereas there could have been a seafloor survey carried out within the final couple a long time of a possible set up website, that’s solely step one. An preliminary mapping go might need be made to substantiate the years-old maps and add element, then one other for allowing, for environmental assessments, engineering, building, and common inspections. If this might be carried out with a turnkey automated course of that produced even higher outcomes than crewed ships for much less cash, it’s an enormous win for patrons counting on outdated strategies. And if the trade grows as anticipated to require extra lively monitoring of the seafloor alongside each U.S. coast, it’s a win for Bedrock as properly, naturally.
Image Credits: Bedrock
To make this all occur, after all, you want a craft that may accumulate the information within the first place. “The AUV is a piece of technology we built solely to enable a data product,” mentioned DiMare, however famous that, initially, “we didn’t want to do this.”
“We started to spec out what it looked like to use an off the shelf system,” he defined. “But if you want to build a hyper-scalable, very efficient system to get the best cost per square meter, you need a very specific set of features, certain sonars, the compute stack… by the time we listed all those we basically had a self-designed system. It’s faster, it’s more operationally flexible, you get better data quality, and you can do it more reliably.”
And amazingly, it doesn’t even want a ship — you possibly can seize it from the again of a van and launch it from a pier or seaside.
“From the very beginning one of the restrictions we put on ourselves was ‘no boats.’ And we need to be able to fly with this thing. That totally changed our approach,” mentioned DiMare.
Image Credits: Bedrock
The AUV packs quite a bit right into a small bundle, and whereas the sensor loadout is variable relying on the job, one side that defines the craft is its high-frequency sonar.
Sonars function in a variety of frequencies, from the tons of to the tons of of hundreds of hertz. Unfortunately that signifies that ocean-dwelling creatures, a lot of which may hear in that vary, are inundated with background noise, generally to the purpose the place it’s dangerous or deters them from coming into an space. Sonar working about 200 kHz is secure for animals, however the excessive frequency means the sign attenuates extra shortly, decreasing the vary to 50-75 meters.
That’s clearly nugatory for a ship floating on the floor — a lot of what it must map is greater than 75 meters deep. But for those who might make a craft that all the time stayed inside 50 meters of the seabed, it’s full of advantages. And that’s precisely what Bedrock’s AUV is designed to do.

The elevated frequency of the sonar additionally means elevated element, so the image its devices paint is best than what you’d get with a bigger wave. And as a result of it’s secure to make use of round animals, you possibly can skip the (very needed however time-consuming) purple tape at wildlife authorities. Better, quicker, cheaper, and safer is a hell of a pitch.
Today marks the official launch of Mosaic, and to advertise adoption Bedrock is providing 50 gigs of free storage — of any form of suitable map knowledge, because the platform is format-agnostic.
There’s a ton of knowledge on the market that’s technically “public” however is nonetheless very tough to search out and use. It could also be a low-detail survey from twenty years in the past, or a hyper-specific scan of an space investigated by a analysis group, but when it have been multi functional place it will in all probability be much more helpful, DiMare mentioned.
“Ultimately we want to get where we can do the whole ocean on a yearly basis,” he concluded. “So we’ve got a lot of work to do.”