Dive Technologies to deliver custom-made AUV for Kraken Robotics

Dive Technologies has formally extended the partnership with Kraken Robotics to build a commercial autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) for deep subsea cable and infrastructure inspections and geophysical surveys.

The commercial AUV, known as large displacement autonomous underwater vehicles (DIVE-LD), is being specially made for Kraken Robotics.

It will be equipped with a unique survey sensor suite to augment Kraken’s existing fleet in Canada with a long-range, deep-sea survey capability, the company stated.

“We couldn’t be more excited to build and deploy our DIVE-LD to our first commercial customer”, says Bill Lebo, co-founder and chief executive officer at Dive Technologies.

“Kraken Robotics and Dive Technologies share the same vision for subsea exploration. Our AUV joining Kraken’s fleet is a testament to our joint pursuit of creating next-generation subsea technologies with the range and capabilities necessary to address new subsea markets and deliver meaningful survey and inspection data to a myriad of commercial customers”.

Dive Technologies will deliver DIVE-LD to Kraken Robotics later this summer.

“Working together with Dive Technologies on this build and custom sensor suite has been an amazing experience and we’re excited to get the vehicle into the ocean and collecting data later this year”, says Greg Reid, chief operating officer at Kraken Robotics.

“Dive’s ability to rapidly integrate and configure their AUV to meet our needs with technologies such as a Multi-Spectral Synthetic Aperture Sonar and SeaVision 3D Laser imager is incredible and speaks volumes to the flexibility of their architecture”.

To remind, Kraken Robotics and Dive Technologies entered into an agreement in August 2020 whereby Kraken agreed to supply subsea batteries for the DIVE-LD.

In April, Dive Technologies concluded sea trials of Kraken Robotics’ miniature synthetic aperture sonar (MINSAS 120) integrated onto its DIVE-LD.

Sea trials lasted from 29 March to 8 April 2021, and were conducted in shallow water and very shallow water environments in the United States.

Two weeks later, Kraken Robotics informed it received another order for SeaPower batteries from Dive Technologies for DIVE-LD.

The value of the order is $0.6 million, and the batteries are expected to be delivered in the third quarter of 2021. They will be integrated into the third DIVE-LD production hull.