A Scalable Solution to Monitoring Our Changing Oceans

ARMADA has a bold plan to become the "SpaceX of the sea" with a scalable solution that reduces the carbon footprint of in situ ocean monitoring eliminating single-use sensor waste. Today's tools are largely based around crewed research vessels that service moorings, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), and expendable sensing packages. These tools scale poorly, continue our reliance on fossil fuels, and contribute to marine waste, all of which are unsustainable. We address scalability in three key ways: 1. Combine innovative propulsion and ballast technologies to create a new class of uncrewed underwater sensing platform with both mobility and persistence that is fundamentally simpler to produce and achieve economies of scale. 2. An operations strategy that leverages the platform's unique capabilities to selectively ride ocean currents, enabling a constellation of platforms to achieve "dynamic persistence" through full life cycles of deployments and recoveries from shore locations. 3. Colocate manufacturing and launch facilities upstream of major currents and position recovery infrastructure in regions that minimize platform energy consumption to reach. ARMADA will use this Phase I SBIR to study the feasibility of our operations strategy through ocean current and energy modeling to inform the design of a prototype platform in Phase II.