Page 24: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2023)

INSIGHTS FELIX SCHILL, HYDROMEA

The offshore industry, particularly the rapid acceleration of offshore wind, is resulting in more structure going into the water than ever before, in a short window of time … infrastructure that has to be monitored and maintained. “We really see the potential for a drone revolution like we've seen with aerial drones happening subsea.”

Felix Schill, CTO, Hydromea

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Schill’s interview @ https://youtu.

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PhD research on underwater swarm technology. “Back then, we looked at the key enabling technologies to have underwa- ter swarms,” said Schill. “One of them is scalable communica- tion between the robots because you would like to have 20, 30, 50 of these devices talking to each other.”

The other big tech hurdle is positioning, to ensure that the ve- hicles know where they are with respect to the others. “I did my

PhD in underwater communication for swarms, and Alex did his PhD on distributed localization using acoustics,” said Schill.

Photos courtesy Hydromea

The pair separated to pursue their individual academic proj- ects, but a few years later met again in Switzerland at the ounded in 2015, Hydromea recently celebrated its EPFL University, mutually deciding that their work apart ac- eighth year in business, and though still under a tually ? t together.

decade old, with 17 employees today the compa- And do Hydromea was founded.

ny has eight products in three different production “Initially we developed Vertex, which was an AUV for en-

F lines. “The ? rst is our disc drive thrusters, which vironmental monitoring, which started off as an academic are the thinnest rim driven thrusters in the world; we have two project within the university,” said Schill. “Then we spun that different models available,” said Schill. “We have a line of out into the company. In the meantime, we also developed the high-speed optical underwater communication devices called LUMA Optical Modems and the disc drive thrusters, which

LUMA with ? ve different models going from ultra-low power started off as a component on our AUV.” to very high bandwidth for live video streaming. And we just With the vehicle created and now on display at trade shows, launched EXRAY, which is a wireless inspection ROV.” the company started getting inquiries on it, as well as on the in- dividual components. “Eventually, we pivoted from the AUV to the inspection ROV space with EXRAY, which is a wireless

Two Decades & Counting

While Hydromea was founded in 2015, its history stretches inspection drone, which uses LUMA for the wireless video almost 20 years ago when Schill and Alexander Barr started link,” said Schill. “You can actually get HD video in real time 24 March/April 2023

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