11.19 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 83
for Marine Robotics at Woods
Hole. For decades ocean scien-
tists have structured their work
around the limited time they
could afford to book aboard ves-
sels, subs, and other million-
dollar equipment. With data
suddenly much easier to ob-
tain, says Bellingham, a grow-
ing number of researchers have
found that their dream projects
can happen much faster.DAVID LANG IS looking a bit
green. It’s just before noon,
and for the past couple of hours
we’ve been in a small boat,
bobbing in the waves of Mon-
terey Bay. Also on board are the
hired captain, a Sofar market-
ing staffer, and a cameraman
fi lming an episode of Tested,
the geeky web series hosted
by MythBusters veteran Adam
Savage. Floating next to us in
an infl atable boat are Stack-
pole, Sofar CEO Tim Janssen,
and a second cameraman con-
trolling a DJI Phantom drone.
A low ceiling of fog has delayed
what we’re all waiting for: a
plane that will make a series of
low passes overhead, each time
shoving one of Sofar’s smart
buoys out a cargo door.
The buoys, called Spotters,
look like bright yellow plastic
basketballs, each topped with
a sun hat of solar panels. Out-
fitted with sensors to measure
wind and waves, they can trans-
mit data via satellite from al-
most anywhere on the water.
Sofar sells them for $4,900
apiece, or about 10 to 50 times
less than the price of the large
surface buoys commonly used
by NOAA. The Spotters don’t
collect data at the same preci-
sion or frequency as those tradi-
tional tools, but because they’re
so cheap and small, they can
be deployed in locations where
standard buoys aren’t viable be-
cause of expense or logistics. In
February 2018, a New Zealand
researcher dropped five Spot-
ters off a ship into the Southern
Ocean, which circles Antarctica
and is the birthplace of massive
storms that can affect coast-
lines thousands of miles away.
The Spotters were the fi rst free-fl oating buoys to continuously
measure wind and waves in the
frigid waters, and their endur-
ance suggested the possibility of
vastly improved weather track-
ing in the region. In the course
of a year, they drifted more than
4,000 miles and transmitted
readings from the notoriously
violent Drake Passage.
In addition to improving fore-
casts, autonomous monitoring
tools have the potential to in-
form scientific studies of cli-
mate change; a Saildrone re-
cently lapped Antarctica to
collect fi rst-of-its-kind data on
carbon levels. In the shipping
industry, detailed real-time in-
formation about ocean con-
ditions can help tankers alter
their routes, saving enormous
amounts of fuel.
Then there are the recre-
ational uses. Surfers and anglers
get their marine forecasts from
applications that rely on gov-
ernment buoys, which are typ-
ically stationed near shipping
lanes and airports. If your favor-
ite break or fi shing hole is miles
away, the predictions aren’t
trustworthy. Which is why, last
year, big-wave surfer Grant
Washburn moored a Spot-
ter near Mavericks, the mon-
ster break south of San Fran-
cisco. Suddenly, he was able to
get local data delivered to his
phone, letting him know the size
and frequency of swells. In many
places—remote atolls, rocky
coastlines— getting buoys into
the field is a major challenge,
and today the Sofar team is hop-
ing to demonstrate that Spotters
can tolerate one of the simplest
deployment techniques: drop-ping them from a plane. The
team’s goal is to test different
sizes of parachutes to see what
it takes to slow the buoy’s de-
scent enough to avoid damaging
it. There’s also an alternate sys-
tem that has Stackpole excited:
a cardboard box. If Spotters are
going to be sent to customers all
over the world, he fi gures, why
not mail them in boxes that dou-
ble as landing systems?
Before loading five Spotters
into a chartered plane at a nearby
airport, Stackpole explained
how, if you opened the specially
designed top fl aps of a box be-
fore pushing it out the cargo
door, the aerodynamics would
cause the flaps to extend out-
ward like wings, making the box
spin and creating enough drag to
slow its fall. Once in the water,
the box would break apart, with
minimal impact on the marine
environment. “There’s all sorts
of ways it could go wrong,” he
admitted with a smile. “The box
could end up tumbling and the
Spotter could fall out. We’ll just
have to fi gure it out!”
But fi rst the fog has to lift. On
the water, the team fi lls the time
with a test fl ight of the Phantom
drone and some fretting about a
nearby sailboat. (“They’re going
to think this is a drug drop,” Lang
says.) Janssen motors the infl at-
able craft alongside our boat,
and Stackpole offers every one
snacks: a loaf of pepper bread,
hummus, and Frosted Mini-
Wheats. Lang winces.
The seasickness he’s feel-
ing is just one of the challenges
the guys have had to overcome.
After getting their funding from
the Schmidt foundation in 2012,Stackpole and Lang developed
a working ROV and made sev-
eral dives in that cave in the
Coastal Range. They didn’t fi nd
any gold—the robot’s camera
picked up only debris—but the
effort earned them a different
kind of treasure. The commu-
nity created through OpenROV
.com helped them raise $111,000
in a Kickstarter campaign that
promised backers a DIY under-
water-robot kit. A year later,
OpenROV secured $1.3 million
in a funding round led by True
Ventures, a San Francisco firm
that was an early investor in Fit-
bit. That propelled the design
of their fi rst ready-for-market
drone, which they announced,
in another Kickstarter cam-
paign, in 2015.
Dubbed the Trident, it was
roughly the size of a cereal box
and looked like it could have
been designed by Apple, with a
sleek, white, hard-plastic body,
jet-black rubber side panels,
and a single camera eye front
and center. It was capable of
withstanding freezing temper-
atures and dives of up to 330
feet—three times as deep as a
typical scuba diver—and could
light up a shipwreck (or giant
clam) with an array of six LED
lights. Twin props enabled a
maximum speed of six and a
half feet per second. The Tri-
dent was a hit, garnering more
than $815,000 in pledges.
Back on the water in Monterey,
the fog dissipates suddenly and
the plane makes its fi rst bombing
run, sending a buoy attached to
a small black and red parachute
hurtling toward the Pacific. It
smacks the water hard, and theA rendering
of OceanX’s
forthcoming
exploration and
fi lmmaking vesselCO
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