Page 13: of Marine Technology Magazine (July 2011)

www.seadiscovery.com really amazing; it changes the game and changes what you ever thought you could do before. If you have a deep ocean ship you have to send out, you could spend $70,000 a day to have it sent out at sea. How does the Liquid Robotics solutionhelp to minimize this expense?Vass: We launch a mile offshore, or we can launch from shore, too, if the waters deep enough. Its a game- changer economically, but it takes a while for people to get the idea thatwere going to launch them from California and theyre going to oper- ate in the middle of the Pacific, sever- al thousand miles offshore. How does this system fill multipleneeds, from commercial to military to scientific?Vass: Basically, anything you could do with a ship, a buoy or a satellite, you can do with this system. It makes sense economically, and from an eco- logical perspective, as well as from a human safety perspective. You can imagine the Wave Glider, when youre talking about (the need for power at sea for UUVs) being the power plat- form for sea vehicles. It can operate on a surface as a dock, giving you the ability to fill up at a battery station at sea. In addition, the vehicles can transmit data while they are still doing their mission. So you can imag- ine fleets of these continuously moni-toring pipelines, conducting surveys of undersea cable, doing archeological surveys, looking for seismic events ? there is just a huge number of appli- cations. So ultimately, what do you envision your companys role in this? Vass: The goal is to set up all these