How Can an Underwater Drone Cost $50,000?

Will O'Brien says Ulysses can sell an underwater vehicle for as cheap as $50,000 when the customer is a navy. The most common autonomous underwater vehicle the US Navy buys today is somewhere on the order of maybe $5 million, so the base vehicle is two orders of magnitude cheaper.

Navy work, ocean conservation, and energy operations are still done in much the same way: a big, expensive surface ship. Ships are not being built fast enough, so there is a backlog just to get one. Chartering the ship costs on the order of maybe a few hundred thousand dollars a day. Advanced sensing and advanced navigation still leave the underwater vehicle one order of magnitude cheaper, a low-cost platform that can take added sensors. The surface vehicle is less than a million dollars and more than maybe half a million, but it depends.

Vehicle sales are mainly for navies. Offshore industry customers more often want to buy services, with operations run as a services business.