Will O'Brien
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Cheeky Pint · The company building underwater drones for $50,000
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How Do Underwater Drones Clear Fishing Lines From Wind Cables?
Will O'Brien says floating offshore wind in California runs into abandoned fishing lines that snag on the power cables in the water and then catch dolphins and whales. That entanglement is one of the biggest objections to the projects.
Ulysses is building a surface and underwater vehicle that maps those cables every day, checks whether they are still in good condition, and looks for lines caught on them. When a line is caught, an implement on the vehicle cuts it off the cable.
A ship and a crew used to be the way to watch a cable. A robot that can patrol the line and clear the debris is the ocean job this vehicle is being sold to do.
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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
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Why Do Hardware Founders Make What the World Needs?
Will O'Brien says the hardware founders he sees start companies to make something the world needs, not only something people want. They look different from the usual software founders: a bit louder, the kind who go to church on Sunday, and typically working on hardware rather than software. The Y Combinator line, make something people want, sits against that other motivation, and a spiritual reason is part of his own decision to start.
Jeff Bezos is his example of a head-oriented founder: the internet was growing at 30% per annum, books move easily and do not go off, so Bezos started Amazon. Steve Jobs is the heart-based founder, tied to the bicycle for the mind. Founders in the present era
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Why Is Communication the Biggest Problem for Ocean Robots?
Will O'Brien says communication is the biggest problem for a robot that lives in the ocean. Corrosion and pressure are huge external forces, but a coating and anodizing the metal give some resistance to corrosion, and pressure can be limited by staying far above full ocean depth.
Full ocean depth is 6,000 meters. The ocean goes to about 10,000 meters in its deepest parts. The vehicles currently operate up to 1,500 meters and have been crush tested to 2,200 meters. Most important economic activity today happens in the 1,500 meter range. He thinks much more will happen later, particularly in critical minerals. Acoustic links manage about 10 kilobytes per second over about five kilometers, a p
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Why Build Inertial Navigation for Underwater Drones?
Will O'Brien is bringing inertial navigation in-house for scale and lead time. The systems are bought off the shelf today. Internal prototypes are meant to replace the current suppliers at a fraction of the price of a very expensive, long-lead-time supplier, on a supply chain that can scale.
About 20 million aerial drones are built every year, and maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. The vision calls for millions of underwater drones, so the build sits on electric vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, and consumer electronics supply chains, where parts are made in the order of millions rather than maritime volumes. One supplier makes 100 to 200 of a needed component per year. The h
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How Much of the Ocean's Carbon Is in Seagrass?
Will O'Brien says seagrass covers 2% of the seafloor and holds 20% of the ocean's carbon. The ocean is the world's largest natural carbon sink, and about 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on seagrass as habitat. Seagrass is the unsung hero in his account: a flashier plant gets the funding and the attention, while seagrass gets almost none.
Seagrass grows along the coastlines of Ireland, the UK, California, the East Coast, and Australia. The same species grows in Ireland and California. Restoration projects are underway in Virginia, southern Florida, Sausalito in California, and the Great Barrier Reef.
Ulysses started by restoring seagrass and still runs those projects, even th
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Why Did Ulysses Build Underwater Robots?
Will O'Brien says Ulysses builds robots to solve some of the most critical tasks in the oceans. He calls the line the simple one-liner for a company that started three years ago.
Three years ago it was already clear that autonomous systems and robotics were going to do an increasing share of the world's GDP and an increasing share of critical work. He and his co-founders looked for domains where robotic systems could be deployed. A cursory look at air, land, and sea made the sea very interesting. A further look at the surface versus the undersea made the undersea very interesting. They could quickly identify jobs that were not being done underwater, were not being done on a scale, or were n
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Why Is Student's T-test Called Student?
Will O'Brien says the student t-test still carries the name Student because William Sealy Gossett published the small-sample method under that pseudonym so competitors would not learn Guinness had hired researchers to solve the problem.
Guinness was building an in-house research and development team as early as the 1890s. The team hired very smart people, told them to find a problem, and let the work run without a set direction. Lipids, or fats, in hops are among the biggest predeterminants of the quality of a pint of Guinness. The brewery had to test hundreds of hops to judge whether a batch was high quality, and it was losing a few percent per batch. In the high-volume, low-margin food an