Hydrus is an autonomous drone that makes underwater surveying easy and affordable.
Recorded in June 2022
Join Peter Baker and Morgan McDermont from Advanced Navigation to learn how Hydrus is disrupting the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) industry. The drone revolution is happening, in the deep! Our hosts take you through the whole product journey, from inspiration and design philosophy to technical challenges and innovative capabilities.
Peek under the hood
4K 60 FPS Camera
Wireless charging
Smart lighting system
Hubless thrusters
AI Powered navigation system
E-ink screen
USBL positioning & Acoustic modem
Forward facing sonar
Key Numbers
3,000
Depth Rating
4K
Video Resolution
9
Range
3
Endurance
Truly Autonomous
Hydrus takes the drone revolution underwater, with the most advanced navigation and communication systems of any subsea vehicle. It contains a DVL, USBL, INS, acoustic and optical modem, all tightly integrated. This enables highly reliable, fully autonomous underwater missions at your fingertips. It also provides obstacle detection and collision avoidance.
Stunning Imagery
Hydrus produces stunning imagery, even in challenging low light and turbid conditions. Through its innovative combination of a 4K camera, dynamic lighting and AI image processing, Hydrus delivers high quality georeferenced footage. The high 60 frames per second allows fast movements to be captured and enhances machine vision capability, allowing for AI classification and analysis to be performed onboard. Hydrus can create 3D RGB point clouds by combining imagery with its sonar and navigation data.
Small and Affordable
Hydrus condenses its advanced features into one of the smallest, and most affordable autonomous underwater vehicles on the market. Its fully encapsulated polymer construction provides best-in-class reliability with minimal maintenance. It is certified flight safe to standard UN38.3 and can be shipped by air or carry-on baggage.
Intuitive Mission Control
Hydrus takes complex mission design out of the expert domain and into the hands of anyone that needs underwater data. It features an intuitive point and click 3D map interface that makes creating complex missions simple and allows untrained operators to use the system out of the box. Mission execution utilises AI for reliable navigation and image quality control.
Open Platform
Hydrus is able to integrate your custom software as a payload, offering full access to the camera, sensors, navigation, modems and control. The powerful and open architecture is ideal for machine vision and AI applications.
And more incredible features
One solution. Endless applications.
Reef Monitoring
Hydrus unique thruster configuration and small size allow it to maneuver around complex reef structures in ways no other underwater vehicle can.
The unique manoeuvrability, combined with ultra high definition image capture makes it ideal for AI analysis and photogrammetry. By removing the need for divers and being deployed and recovered by a single person, Hydrus cuts operating costs, allowing monitoring surveys to be performed at higher frequencies, giving greater resolution to complex datasets.
Environmental Mapping
The tight integration of the imaging and navigation systems allows Hydrus to capture high-resolution seabed images that are natively georeferenced. They can be transferred directly into industry-standard software for GIS applications, mosaicing, and photogrammetry. Hydrus missions are able to be saved and re-shot as frequently as required, offering incredibly repeatable images at whatever time spacing the user demands.
Offshore Windfarm inspection
Hydrus redefines computing power in underwater drones, with onboard capability to provide AI image processing and capture, tightly coupled with dynamic mission adjustment based on image quality. This gives users confidence that Hydrus is capturing the best quality images of their assets, in the most challenging conditions. This power can be utilised to automate tasks such as windfarm inspection by generating high quality, geo-referenced imagery.
Object Localisation and Classification
Hydrus is the only AUV on the market to truly offer rapid deployment capability, given its flight safe status, and single-person deployment ability. This allows users to get Hydrus where it is needed quickly, safely and cost-effectively. Once in location, the open platform architecture allows users to run their own software payloads onboard, with direct access to the imaging data, sensor data, and navigation system. The processing capability of Hydrus is optimised for intensive AI operations such as machine vision, allowing for tasks such as object localisation and classification to be performed rapidly.
Documentation
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