everybody so we're outside of Santa Cruz California on this really cold summer
morning and we're here to watch this awesome test so the folks behind me
right now are from so far Ocean Technology it's a combination of two
companies awesome ocean robot companies one is open ROV where we've met before
the other is spoon drift who makes the spotter that's that yellow buoy over
there and their plan right now is to get this buoy and into the ocean and to
really gather data in a way that's unprecedented before they've been
working the past couple weeks for this test to deploy these buoys not from
boats but from a plane that plane right there they don't know how this is gonna
work they've been working up mechanisms for deployment and well I'm gonna let
them talk about it but this is super exciting day so we're gonna come along
with all their journey let's check it out okay so with me here is a spotter
buoy this is a device that we've designed which is able to measure
weather data and other things about what's going on in the ocean at a very
low cost and we can build tons of them and send them all around the ocean one
of the challenges we have with these is getting them out into the water itself
we have to take a big ship to get them out to the middle of the sea or if
there's a big storm coming no one wants to go out there with a boat to deploy
them so what we're working on is a way to deploy these from an airplane the
idea is if we can drop these from a plane you could fly in front of a
hurricane and get them in front of the hurricane to understand what's going on
or you could deploy them in the open ocean without having to use ship time it
just seems like it would be a really useful idea in general so the job I've
been tasked with is to design a mechanism that allows us to drop spotter
from a plane using a parachute or some other sort of device and then when it
lands and hits the water that mechanism deploys away from the spotter and it's
left to drift freely in the ocean the design I've come up with is basically I
kind of call it like a salad bowl it's just a bowl shaped thing and inside of
it is this special mechanism that uses a bobbin from a automatically inflating
lifejacket so the way these bobbins work is there's this salt material and when
it hits water that salt material dissolves and this inner diameter of the
bobbin opens up that'll allow this metal pin which is pulled
spring to retract and that retracting pin is going to be holding some strings
that come around the bowl and go around to the top of the buoy where the
parachute is attached so today I'm gonna be attaching those strings to this bowl
and making sure that everything fits right and then a little bit later on we
can go to our test tank and see if the release mechanism works properly
okay so I've told you about the first design which i think is pretty
straightforward and honestly I have pretty good faith that it's gonna work
the second design that we're gonna try dropping is a little bit more radical
it's something I thought of that would really help us with keeping things low
cost making them very vital degradable and I just think it's super cool we're
calling this the cardboard box design basically this is the exact same box
that we would ship spotter in when we're shipping it to someplace in the world
but we designed the box in a way that it can also act as the descent mechanism
this is the outer shipper this protects the boxes it's being shipped away and
it's kind of like you're removed before flight box you pull this off once you
get the package and then it's ready to be dropped from the airplane the box is
like a normal one except for that the flaps are a little bit longer than you
normally expect and the idea is when the box is falling they'll open out and act
kind of like a shuttlecock will create more drag and that will cause this to
move slowly enough that it hits the water at an acceptable speed the
challenge is if there was some sort of strap or something that had to hold
these open when it was falling the shear when we drop it out of the plane going
in 200 miles an hour it would probably rip the fins off so we came up with a
new design which lets this slow down before the shuttlecock wings open up the
way that works is that it's initially closed and when it hits the air these
will from drag force spring back and they'll go straight back but there's
this slit that goes along the side of it and that causes an asymmetry which makes
the whole box spin and the hope is that that spinning motion will create
centrifugal force that causes these to slowly open up after it's already
decelerated and hopefully that'll allow the whole thing to slow down enough
before it hits the water inside of the box is our spotter once it hits the
water this box will start to sink this part will float away and then spotter
should be released I'm definitely not sure this will work
probably something will break I'm just not sure what and that's what we'll be
testing okay so what we're gonna do now is try to rig up this parachute release
mechanism with the lines that are needed and then we're going to be able to go
test it so basically we just need to build the lines that go around spotter
attach them to the mechanism and see what happens
yeah looks pretty good okay so this is our test of the release mechanism what
should happen is when I put this in the water the bobbin is gonna dissolve and
allow this metal pin to retract these red strings there's three sets of them
are going to be released from that which will allow this parachute to come off
the top the ring will be detached meanwhile this bowl now that it's not
attached to the strings will fall down and the chain will be released so I
guess we'll see if it works okay here we go
okay deploying in three two one
bye now the bobbin should have retracted if there was some tension let's see if
those strings would be released they're not what I'm thinking is maybe what's
happening which I haven't tested before is there's an air bubble around where
the bobbin is and so the water is not dissolving the salt fast enough at this
point I think what I'll do is I'll pull it out and then see if I can take back
to the lab oh there goes
you guys nervous I'm nervous just kidding all right so this is round two
last time we noticed that the water proof or the water release bobbin did
not work and I think that's because it was trapped in air bubble so now we've
drilled holes in the top of the bowl which should help flood that area and
allow it to get wet faster so it will release quicker but only the testing
will tell us if that actually works so here we go three two one all right I
think that made the difference
testing completed in the lab it was time to take these buoys out into the field
or more specifically into the air but plane was loaded up and the team headed
out onto the water to await the air drops
one out with Jason Eric and Jim on the road getting ready to watch the boys
bought an airplane yeah we heard from them that the plane would rather have a
higher ceiling preferably this guy so they're standing by as we wait for
the weather to clear
after a short wait we heard it plane was coming
we saw it approach from the distance and everyone braced for the drops
got the ball
so that was awesome truly thrilling from our perspective on
the beach watching those buoys deploy from that plane but it is a couple weeks
later and now we're about to check in with a so far team again to see from
their perspective was that test success so check it out
okay Eric so that was super fun to watch I can't even imagine what it was like
for you guys on the boats watching the buoys come down but now leave time to
review the footage was it success I would call it a success we learned a lot
from it I mean I was kind of sad that it was so overcast that day you know we had
the ceiling that didn't allow the plane to get quite as high as we wanted so for
the box tests we weren't really able to draw a strong conclusion you know it
seemed like that first box is it fell out of the plane started to spin up the
wings were starting to come out but before we had a chance for it to
stabilize it just hit the water the parachutes however I thought did great
every single test we did looked like a success you know the kind of thing that
holds the chain on the bottom deployed properly I'm really excited about the
future and the fact that you could deploy so many so quickly in the plane
and that was just really fun to see wasn't that rad there was this one time
we were like alright well now we've deployed one at a time let's try doing
them in serial and we put me through four out of the plane all at once and it
was just so cool to watch as like they just kind of made this dotted line
coming from the plane and yeah I think this really means a lot for how these
sorts of instruments can be deployed we could fly a plane in front of a
hurricane and dump a bunch of them out and be able to get you know more weather
data more ocean data than anyone ever has been able to in rapid time because
that's the idea these are in the ocean now traditional you've been having toss
over off a cargo ships and other other ships but now the potential is there to
deploy them where their ships don't pass yeah you're totally right and in with
the way we've generally deployed these is we call them ships of opportunities
so there's some freighter that's going across the Pacific we'll give them a few
and they throw them overboard on their way it's strategic points but there are
a lot of areas in the ocean like the polar regions the South Pacific where
there just isn't that much boat traffic so this will allow us to potentially get
into these remote spots really effectively and then also if there's
really time critical events like like we mentioned a coming hurricane and we want
to understand how the hurricane is moving and progressing with the weather
conditions below the hurricane are this sort of a system I think will be you
know disruptive for that kind of observation so because of the cost
because of the versatility and because of how much data you can get and that
orders of magnitude greater than previous technologies like this like
what's the dream what's the end goal for four spotter well you know I mean it's
been amazing to me to see how little we know about the ocean I mean right now
it's not even like I couldn't give you a forecast of what the ocean is gonna be
you know somewhere in the middle of the ocean a few days from now we couldn't
even tell you with better than fifty percent accuracy what the weather is
right now so you know that's just the surface but I think our goal at so far
is to understand the ocean better than anyone has so with a low-cost device
like spotter I hope we're gonna be able to really
understand you know the rest of the planet in a profound way you know that
movie twister where they have the little things that they throw it into the India
you know and that makes the big difference this is kind of like that but
real life and for the entire ocean it oceans a big place it's a big place and
so you need a lot of sensors to do it but I think I think we're well equipped
especially with this new technology we're developing so it's a different way
thing about robots you guys have tried in so that go underneath the water or
something bots on the water and super cool it's gotta be it's gotta be
everything you know it's it's not just about understanding what wave conditions
are you know spotter can do that really well but as as a company and kind of a
group of interested people we're really trying to make instruments for all
aspects you know the deep sea you know right below the surface we're looking at
what happens happening with biological systems what's happening the atmosphere
water temperature there's a huge amount of stuff to study and you know you can't
do it with just one type of sensor so you know this is definitely just the
beginning for us and you can't do it with one type of testing environment
anything in the field thank you so much for taking us on this journey and can't
wait to see what you guys do next I've been so glad to have you guys here thank
you very much