Page 48: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2021)

INTERVIEW Tim Janssen, CEO, Sofar Ocean Technologies

All images courtesy Sofar Ocean Technologies satellite connected, metocean buoy. In addition, and this is re- mentally in terms of cost, what’s really important is that the ally critical, we’re building standardization to enable a rapid cost of the nodes has to become incredibly small. To be suc- expansion of sensing in the ocean. (Traditionally) every sen- cessful and at scale, thousands, tens of thousands of sensors, sor, every piece of hardware is different, with a different proto- complete planetary coverage, we have to bring the cost down col, and a different connector. If you try to put them together, of the individual nodes radically. things get ugly quick, and everything turns into an engineer- That’s basically what we’re working on in order to drive the ing project. Engineering projects are great for engineers, (but) scale. (So today we’re) focusing on scale ? rst, being disci- they’re bad for almost everybody else (because) they cost a plined around the hardware that we’re building and trying to lot of time and money. What we want to do is create large, enable the community to drive the innovation needed to grow heterogeneous networks of sensors that cover much more than faster.

we’ve ever been able to do before. Creating a standardization discipline is not just for us; this going to be completely open What do you consider to be the biggest challenge to to the community to enable faster innovation on the sensor keeping this network functional and growing?

level and integration into platforms like ours to create broader I think the most important thing about maintaining some- capability. What it does immediately for us is that it enables us thing like this is to show its value. Fundamentally what we’re to integrate subsurface sensors, so our Spotter platform now focusing on is in creating value out of this data, creating in- can also measure water levels, salinity, temperature, etc.; and sights that haven’t been available before. So there are two any other subsurface sensors that could bene? t from having a parts to this. One is broad application: driving innovation and real time connectivity platform associated with it. So funda- standardization across the community, because with that, ev- 48 November/December 2021

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