Amar Shar, the co-founder ofBritish AI unicorn Wayve, has backed Oshen, a budding startup building miniatureautonomoussailboats.
The little robots could transform the way scientists monitor everything from ocean temperatures and waves to biodiversity.
The startup is building small solar-powered seaborn satellites that sail around the ocean gathering data.
The littlerobotscould make marine data acquisition more accessible than ever before.
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But these devices have to be manually deployed and tend to drift around, making precise measurements difficult.
Doing research at sea is prohibitively expensive, says Laverack.
Which is why biodiversity surveys are brief and infrequent, and offshore weather data patchy.
Autonomous sailing vessels offer a workaround.
The little probes harness wind and solar power to navigate, with onboard batteries providing backup power.
But its creators eventually aim to operate the bots for months or even years at a time.
Oshen has developed its own autonomous software to help the drones navigate.
As we move into an AI-dominant world, machine learning models and hardware are becoming commodities, said Shah.
Oshens vision is essentially this for ocean and weather data.
The company is now refining its design at its new headquarters in Plymouth.
It says it is in talks with energy and weather data providers in the UK and US.
Story bySion Geschwindt
Sion is a freelance science and technology reporter, specialising in climate and energy.
