TTT029 Deploying undersea explorers – Jeff Smith – Saab

3:50PM Feb 13, 2024

Speakers:

Jonathan

Forrest Meyen

Announcer

Jeff Smith

Keywords:

vehicle

systems

work

saab

started

years

companies

ocean

bluefin

undersea

big

space

navy

power

deep

sensors

drive

area

day

technology

Welcome to Tough Tech Today with Meyen and Miller. This is the premier show featuring trailblazers who are building technologies today to solve tomorrow's toughest challenges.

Welcome to Tough Tech Today. We are really excited to be joined today by Jeff Smith. Yeah, all of you remember, we are kicking off our newest season. And our first theme is about Blue Technologies. And so we're going to ask Jeff imminently to to walk us through the lay of the land, so to say the lay of the sea, I should say. But first, Jeff is a guru of undersea systems, autonomous systems. And, you know, that Venn Diagram of where those, those intersect. He's currently the vice president and general manager for autonomous and undersea systems at Saab. He has quite the quite the credentials in terms of amazing startups that he's developed and companies he's contributed to including Bluefin Riptide support for the US Navy over over decades. And so, welcome, Jeff, please help us bring us into your blue world.

For us, Jay. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, no, it's, you know, the oceans, you know, it's an amazing part of the planet, right, that over 70% of the Earth's surface, you know, I go back to, you know, as a child, you know, I can remember every time Jacques Cousteau was on in the early 70s, you know, we were all over it as a family watching it and just really grew up sort of out in the out in the woods, but always had a, you know, love for the ocean, I'm an avid scuba diver, you know, in my career, fortunately, has kind of come along the path that I've been able to work in a lot of technology supporting the ocean. And I found the sort of magic niche between undersea or, you know, the undersea and robotics, and it's just, you know, it. You know, as the saying goes, if you, if you have a passion for what you do, you'll never really work a day in your life. And, you know, I kind of feel like, that's, that's where I am, I've, you know, I found technology area that I can really, you know, thrive in and in an area that I'm passionate about. And, you know, there's a lot of work there given, given how much we know about the ocean, given what's needed, given, you know, a large Navy customer with a lot of critical mission needs. So it's sort of all aligned into into the space I'm in and into the career I've sort of laid out.

That's amazing. So you mentioned that, you know, Jacques Cousteau was kind of an inspiration for you, was there a time in your career where you where you realized that that this was, you know, blue Tech was an area where you can actually spend your career.

Um, so the, you know, the term blue Tech really hasn't been around that long, right. So, you know, I guess from, you know, coming out of school and going into General Dynamics and working on submarine systems. You know, those a lot of those that work, I did sort of first half of my career, so it was a lot around man systems, I started to get some into the remotely operated vehicles and supporting systems for that. And I was kind of finishing up a master's degree from RPI in, in robotics. And I kind of saw that, you know, the unmanned systems are really starting to come online, like the aerial systems are always there leading the market for, you know, unmanned but the undersea started to really start to gain some traction there, early 2000s, a couple smaller companies, you know, an MIT spin out at Woods Hole spin out, really starting to do some exciting work. And, you know, fortunately, GED at the time tasked me to go figure out how to get involved in that space. And that really led me to start plugging into those companies and figuring out, you know, seeing an opportunity where really, you know, allowed me to get into something that I just had a natural affinity towards. So from a blue tech perspective, you know, probably a little more than half my career, I'd say, you know, close to 20 years, which, you know, I guess I've been doing this a while, you know, 30 years, support over 30 years this year supporting the Navy, across the board with a bunch of programs, but, you know, truly the undersea robotic side and that for about 20 of that

is it is it is some of the the your contributions in terms of of creating companies as well as working within very large, established companies. It sounds like you've been able to navigate that your career as an engineer, and also as a is the business and managerial as well. Next, sometimes that can be perceived that those are like very different silos, yet you imbue sort of all of those traits.

You know, and I think it goes back to have been, I really, you know, I consider myself extremely lucky in everything I've been able to do in this space. And, you know, I go back to General Dynamics and sort of, you know, you start there as an engineer, you eventually become sort of, if you're on the career path, or you know, an engineering manager, then program management becomes a pretty good thing. So you jump into the program management side, and, you know, more business capture. And, you know, Gd, really, I can't say enough about the 15 years I spent with that company, I worked a lot of different areas. And it really, you know, it got me on the, on the track to have more, you know, executive level positions. When I jumped into Bluefin, you know, I stood up a program management group for Bluefin, but then I really started working on Navy capture and laying out solutions for, you know, for what we were going after, under Bluefin became the chief operating officer there. But then I started, you know, I jumped out at start Riptide and, you know, at that point, I hadn't really done any engineering work for, you know, probably at least five years, you know, five or eight years. And, you know, when you start a company, in your kitchen, in a small company, but we're only three of us to start, you know, you really have to do everything. And I really, you know, it was really fun for me to get back into that engineering work and start working designs, and, and building stuff and getting a lot more hands on than I had been in, you know, quite some time. You know, it was really rewarding, but it really, you know, it sort of, it helped me I think, at a time, get a lot more back into that really technical solution focused and getting getting my hands dirty. And you know, that obviously, sort of moved to, you know, evolved to where I am today. And, you know, we started this group and Saab. Again, small team, three people was really like a startup. And, you know, obviously pulled in a fairly significant staff now, and we're growing pretty quickly again, but it's, you know, I enjoyed the hands on work, right, I enjoy being on a boat. I enjoy trying to program vehicles to do things. It's, you know, there's definitely better engineers than me, I will say, and fortunately, they a lot of them worked for me.

That's always great. You gotta be surrounded by a good team. So when you when you started, Riptide like what was your What was your key objective? And how did that evolve over the four years?

You know, I guess the, I love Bluefin right, it was, it was just a really special company for where we were at the time and the seven years I was there, really close knit group of people. And you know, it, you know, the, the UUV community, I guess, and there's a lot of companies in this space, a lot of competition, but they've all kind of started very similarly, right? Smaller companies working to sort of develop agile solutions, and, you know, more of the s&t side, and the reward for a lot of those companies where it's always, you know, you need to win a big Navy program of record, and obviously, big large primes know how to do that. But the smaller companies sort of struggle with it. And, you know, I, I was somewhat fortunate in that I came from General Dynamics, right, I had that big company capture experience. And that led us to a couple things that Bluefin you know, frankly, partnering with General Dynamics, where we were able to win sort of those big programs and get a good foundation. But you look at the, you know, that period, from 2015, to 2020, there was a lot consolidation in the market and a lot of these big defense primes, buying the small sort of agile companies,

but often when you set out to do a startup, you have a particular vision. And then when you get four years down the road, you know, it kind of shifts I was kind of curious on what was your initial kind of problem set? And where did you end up? Well,

I guess, you know, the thing with Riptide is we, you know, what, what I saw, frankly, was an opportunity in the market where there was a gap. The the average vehicles when I started Riptide were over a million dollars in the UV space. And we had, we had started to see some demand signal from the US Navy that, you know, they wanted larger quantities of vehicles, right, and much, much lower costs to get the quantities up. And, you know, the UAV market sort of does lag the UAV market. So, you know, there's lots of, you know, not lots but large Global Hawks that cost millions and millions of dollars. But if you look at the market now, there's, you know, tons of small little small UAS is that support our military and to an extent, you know, when you look at the problem in the ocean, you know, you just can't put that many systems out, especially when they cost millions or 10s of millions are right now. You know, we have the XL unis with the Navy for hundreds of millions, and it's just it becomes sort of unaffordable, but if you can get things out there that really drive the cost down to open up the volume and the quantities of systems that he put more and more nodes out there, that was really the opportunity we saw. So in starting Riptide, you know, there was kind of two things that drove us to how do we create a, you know, $10,000 UB? You know, one was, we think there was a pretty good demand signal there. And the second one was, you know, I didn't have an investor when we started, and I was broke. So, you know, I had a 10k credit card limit, and I figured if I could buy everything I needed to on that I could build a vehicle that I could sell for that, and hopefully make some money.

Awesome. So that the credit, the credit card limit was part of the design tradespace got us started.

The I mean, you know, seriously, though, it's the, it really, it did drive us to make a lot of decisions, I think for, you know, how do you do something at a, you know, add a real design to cost when that hadn't been a large factor in the space. So, you know, first our materials and how we built things and, you know, drove us to a lot of additive manufacturing, because we could do that without having to invest in the molds. You know, there's a lot of things that really sort of taught us to do, and it taught us a good amount of efficiency early on, you know, I come back to, you know, coming over to Saab and sort of starting from scratch, you know, the first program we went after, was this, Mark 39, EMAT, expendable mobile SW training target. And, you know, it's historically it's, it looks like a UV, but it doesn't sort of meet the typical criteria of a UV, it's really a, it's an SW training target. But it's expandable, and you know, the Navy has been buying it for 30 years, almost. And it's less than 10k. So, you know, but we're building them in quantities at 1200 units a year. So it really, you know, I kind of see, like, what we've gotten to with with standing up this group at SAAB is sort of the, you know, the culmination of the vision we kind of had early on back in 2015. And just trying to get into the low cost UAV market,

it could, could you walk us through some of the problem sets that are that were motivating for for Bluefin as well as you know, spinning your career, how those may have changed, like, what walk us through, you help us sort of visualize some of the specific kinds of tasks led to the level of detail that you can share, that's like, say nonclassified, navies. And, and how that works.

You know, so probably the biggest challenge and undersea and it's the one that really affects every single vehicle that's, that's out there, you know, it's its energy. You know, at the end of the day, the, you know, propulsion power, you know, has to has to overcome drag, and, you know, ocean, the water is 100 times more dense than air, and drag is directly proportional to the density of the medium that you're traveling through, right. So, you know, an air you really don't have much of a drag problem in water you you absolutely right. There's a reason that every US Navy submarine is powered by a nuclear reactor. So the and you're not by that you're probably never going to put a nuclear reactor on a small little vehicle, and certainly not an expendable one. But, you know, that energy problem is, it's, you know, it's a big deal. And how do you get, you know, unfortunately, you kind of look at the last, you know, 1020 years, there's been steady improvements in energy densities and battery technology, you know, electric car vehicles really driven a lot of that, and it certainly will drive it and continue to drive that. But, you know, that's a problem that sort of goes across the board. I've been involved with some new energy development programs over the years. You know, early on when I started Riptide actually linked up very closely with a company called open water power. It was an MIT spin out that had aluminum sea water battery, that was really tremendous potential for what that could have done. It was acquired a couple years after I got involved with them by one of the large defense primes again, and, you know, they have, you know, I think they, there was a lot of potential for the technology, but I don't think it still ever sort of crossed the finish line to what it really could have done. But, you know, certainly batteries are a known and understood technology and they continue to evolve. And, you know, every once in a while there's something you know, new anode, capability, new electrolyte, something that gives it a little bit bigger kick, and we're always sort of leaning into what's the what's next. And, you know, there's some things with solid state batteries are coming along that are of interest. You know, out of the graphene stuff, we seem to we monitor pretty closely but you know, it really it's an important area for the technology and where things go. You know, the other big challenge undersea is obviously the environment, you know, it's corrosive, it's hyper Escher you know, the there's a lot of push in Kurt in recent years for deeper, deeper and deeper things, you know, as the, as some things open up with the ocean from exploration side clearly because you know, the bulk of the oceans very deep, right? Yeah, reasonably shallow, easily accessible places along the coast continental shelf, but a lot of the oceans would rather deep and the Navy as a greater need to go there, we're putting, you know, oil exploration is driving deeper and deeper, as the near shore sites become, you know, start to tap out. But there's a lot of things there with, you know, as you get into vehicle designs, you know, at the end of the day, a uv is, what makes the UV is really sort of it goes slow, right? It's efficient, it's neutrally buoyant. So it has to displace its weight in water. So that kind of drives you to, you know, how much you can put in it, to offset the that, you know, water is not too dense at the end of the day, compared to some of your metals, obviously. So, you know, you really have to get high strength to weight materials. We've done a lot in pushing deep with, for instance, carbon fiber, you know, that clearly was a recent, you know, big thing in the news with the Titan submersible on the Titanic, tragic, tragic event that never should have happened. There are certainly limitations to those materials. And they unfortunately, people learn that with their lives.

So what is the seems like it takes a whole plethora of technologies to increase the capabilities of UUVs would you say like, a breakthrough in battery technology is probably kind of the biggest thing that would cause a step change and the capabilities of these vehicles? Or is it something, something else that I haven't thought about yet,

maybe the, the battery technology certainly is an area where if you know, for instance, I obviously do a lot with the Navy, if the Navy can put systems out there instead of for hours to days, days to weeks, weeks to months, you know, that really drives a whole new mission areas, right? It frees up you know, manned assets to go focus on things that are better for them and leave sort of those longer persistent things that unmanned systems really are ideal for. But it really comes down to, you know, how do you get the, you know, how do you get something to stay in the environment for you know, for a long time, that is taking power, there's been some systems over the years that do wave action, you know, power reclamation, we've worked a couple systems, for instance, for solar, some way of generating, you know, power regeneration. And there's also talked about, you know, basically putting down undersea gas stations where, you know, vehicles can plug in power backup and continue on the way but, you know, it's, it's the end of the day, it kind of becomes what's practical for the cost. You know, we've been, I've been in the last several years, really work in a lot of the expendable systems side. So, you know, how do you get the cost down, to be able to put the systems out, you know, and use them for as long as they work, right. And that's, that's an opportunity in the space. But clearly, you know, bigger system Su and the Navy's make a big push for larger vehicles. And, you know, the beauty there is, you typically run the same sensors, as even the smaller vehicles do, it's just you're, you're building a system that much bigger for really the battery volume that that gives you. And then you're driving a propulsion system that's driving a much bigger vehicle, that's really just a big battery. So you're, you know, you're kind of fighting yourself when you when you start looking at how that all works out.

With the focus on autonomy that that you and your your team have had. And is that something that is that plays into or helps inform, say, like the department defense has their replicator program and the concept of like mass and swarming, and it's sort of several flavors of that, which I think the the aerial systems tend to be what folks often think about, because we can go and buy the, you know, a quadcopter drone for relatively low cost nowadays. But is that the big sort of impetus, or perhaps the other way around that the discoveries that you and your teams have made over decades now helped to state drive the DOD to say we need to get better at coordinating and deploying these kinds of attributable systems

are our new CTO and Saab is Dr. Julia Allen and she would probably slap me for not Not saying when you talk about the challenges the the whole AI ml problem, you know, the when you look at the, you know, the environment with with undersea, you know, your heirs got a lot of benefits and even space right you have you pretty much have full time communications, whereas underwater, you know, you really don't, you know you're talking, if you can get an acoustic modem within range, you know that you're talking, you know, 1970s baud rate kind of kind of communications, you're not talking real time you're not talking streaming video, the communications path is is a significant challenge. So as a result of that a lot of the undersea systems have to be smarter, right, they have to have a lot greater autonomy, they have to be able to do a lot more on their own. And, you know, that is a whole challenge in of itself. For the record, mechanical engineer by background, I've worked with some brilliant people on the software and autonomy side. And there's a reason that I've hired a lot of brilliant people in those areas, it's because it's the farthest thing from my expertise, that there is, but you know, we've been making a big push within Saab. Within, you know, we're rolling out a new team that you'll hear more about, sort of in the future here, but a lot of the, you know, our AI ml, it's, our, our plan is really to make every system smarter. And, you know, you talk about, you know, batteries can give you a significant step change, obviously, in the endurance of systems. But at the end of the day, you know, the physics sort of limits what a sensor can do. But when you start talking, how do you apply AI ML to some of these problems and get the most out of that sensor. You know, that's where there's a lot of capability that really hasn't been tapped yet.

With all this talk of robotics and advanced technologies, I want to come up for air to plug our first sponsor, the end effector. It's an exciting new endeavor from yours truly, the end, effector is going to be your source for informed perspectives on the business of breakthroughs and advanced technologies, emerging science, and inventive design. We're kind of like a forward deployed chief tech advisor for our community of investors, entrepreneurs, and industry players, during the end effector mailing list, so you can decode deep Tech with me. Now, let's dive back into the sea with Jeff Smith. I remember reading you this recent, I think within the past week or so, an article not to pick it up from from the journal Cell, if I recall correctly, that was you sort of like biologic inspired, passive sensing, underwater? It is, is there a greater push to to, to make things more passive, I mean, and always like to basically more silent, underwater, one to help the whales ears or whatever, but also, I like adversarial perspective to be to be roughly in acoustically invisible to someone else. Yeah,

I mean, the the noise, you know, there's, there's a bunch of different ways to look at noise subsidy, right? The the, you know, from a sensor perspective, passive acoustics, passive sensors are way less power hungry than active acoustics, right? You're not emitting so you know, you're just really listening. So from that respect, you can put sensors out in systems out that don't have the high power demands as active sensors, you know, from a vehicle side of things, you know, if you have a noisy motor on a system, you know, that's one probably going to interfere with the sonar if especially if it's a lower frequency sonar. So, you know, you're trying to work in spectrums that you don't want to be, you know, and in some cases, your navigation sensors can be putting out signals for you know, your bottom, your Doppler velocity logs, where, you know, you don't want to walk over your imaging centers that are also emitting basically, you know, sonar, acoustic managing signals. So there's, there's signal management that happens obviously, on the vehicles. And then you get into the whole you know, the, the Marine Mammal challenges, right, the there's a lot of noise in the ocean ships drive a lot of that it's not the it's not necessarily just the sonars the you know, I was I was scuba diving off of St. Thomas a month or so ago. And you know, I now appreciate why whales beached themselves, you know, I if I could have swum fast enough to the shore I would have gotten out of the water at a freighter go over me and I you know, it really rattled everything in my body and a lot of us that were on that dive it was it was painful. I just you know, and I clearly don't hear as well as whales do underwater. But yeah, there's you know, there's there's significant noise challenges. There's a lot obviously a lot of construction happening with offshore wind, oil and gas, the those things in those, there's a big effort To try to quiet, quiet those as much as possible. So you're not interfering with the marine mammals and clearly sonars sonars are concerning, depending on the frequencies in that and how much power is in the water. But it's a challenge. So

walk us through how you how you've learned to approach developing these kinds of these novel systems, especially since I think they're, they're, you know, under under siege, especially like deep water systems, would they seem like they'd be difficult to test? How do you design, build, test, evaluate, refine? What's the Learning Cycle look like? Because you had mentioned some, like, sort of agile practices that, you know, over the years and others, what kind of test beds do we need? If someone's interested in getting into the space? Is there, you know, like, like, hypersonics testing, if good luck finding a wind tunnel that that you can book time on? You said like that? Yeah, the

I don't want to say it's the very secret, but you know, it is, it's actually, you know, one of the things I love about, you know, this market and doing what I do is, you know, I have have tested vehicles, and you know, some pretty nice dive areas of the world, you know, off of Hawaii off of rotana and Honduras. And, you know, obviously, operational sites when get to take a vehicle to, you know, pretty nice destination and do a job, it's, you know, that's a lot of fun. But, I mean, ultimately, the vehicles have to go in the water, right, it's what they're made for, it's how you validate them in an operational environment. You know, I looked the last couple of years, there's a lot more activity going on, on the whole digital twin approach, and the model based systems engineering work that goes into sort of trying to validate a lot of the those requirements early, you know, we do do bench testing and things like that, that sort of drive down the costs, but, you know, ultimately, it's, it's expensive to put to put vehicles out in the water. And the bigger the vehicle gets, the more costs that that goes through, right, you're talking, you know, you could need a, you know, a $15,000 a day ship or a $25,000 day ship, if it's a large vehicle. You know, fortune, you know, one of the things that helped me with when I started grip tide was, you know, I have pictures of me out in the lake on a paddleboard, it's, it's pretty easy to test a vehicle that weighs 25 pounds that you can put, you know, put on a commercial aircraft in your overhead and travel wherever you want to, to, you know, throw it out in the ocean, and it runs on alkaline batteries, and things like that. But you know, that really, you know, at the time, there was timing of certain Riptide, there was a couple of other startups and spin offs that came out of blue fin, and a couple of my friends went started a large diameter Vehicle Company, and, you know, I looked at me and I could, I could easily do it on my credit card, and I looked at them, and I'm like, you're gonna need at least 10 mil to get, you know, build the first vehicle. And it's, you know, that's, there's a lot there, the costs, the cost for the systems. You know, it depends what you're doing. But the bigger the system is definitely the higher price it is to test and evaluate it. And then you start talking deep, you know, the challenge with deep is, you know, most of the development companies in the space are in New England. And sadly, there's not really that much deepwater, when you look at the continental shelf, and where we are, you can get to a couple 100 meters, you know, not too far off of Provincetown. But, you know, if you're gonna go to 4000 plus meters, you know, you're you're renting a bigger boat that has to go for at least 24 hours off of Jamestown to get out to the black trenches and off of several 100 miles, that's short. And if you're going to be there for multiple days testing, you know, that drives a bigger boat, overnight capabilities, kitchens, all that kind of stuff. So it is a cost.

For those deep submersible systems, are they I imagine almost, they're all a lot bigger, or is there a class of them that are, you know, smaller vehicles that can withstand? It's,

um, it depends, right? The, when you look at our movies, traditional tethered vehicles, there's a lot of small Harley's now but they can't go that that, that deep, the challenge with our EVs is the is the tether, you know, that provides the power and the control to the vehicle, you know, the deeper you go, that tether is, you know, there's more drag on the tether than there is on the vehicle. So as a result, the vehicle has to now be way overpowered to be able to counter the weight of the tether. So for deep ROV systems, you're talking massive, massive vehicles, you know, 10,000 20,000 pounds, just to be able to manage that tether. When you look at UUVs you know, it's it's how much endurance does it take to get to that depth? You know, from you know, back In my days of Bluefin, you know, typical deep Bluefin vehicles, 6000 meters, right 20,000 feet. And that vehicle, you know, you could do that and a 21 inch vehicle 20 feet long, 3000 ish pounds. But one of the things that sort of came along as I was working with Riptide and starting to develop the lower cost systems was, you know, How deep can you really make it go. And there was a lot of good engineering work that we did at that time. And we basically built a vehicle, you know, little bigger than 25 pounds, but not over 30 that could do full ocean depth, 6000 meters. So titanium, a lot of carbon fiber in that vehicle. You know, we we learned a lot in how you work deep carbon fiber. You know, consequently, when the Titanic happened, we, you know, we imploded a lot of the same materials and learning what we did there. But it's, you know, you can get a small vehicle to work at depth, the question then becomes, well, how much endurance does it have? And how, what can it really carry for a sensor to do a useful mission when it gets there? So there's the trade space really becomes, you know, it's it comes down to size, weight power? And, you know, what's the volume of the sensor or the effector that you're trying to put put with the vehicle at that depth?

How long does it take to descend 6000 meters?

Depends, right? If you can, there's, you know, you go back there was one of our competitors vehicles, and I won't call them out by name, they had a, they were powered by aluminum hydroxide fuel cell, and the fuel cell can wing operate within a 15 degree tilt with the way that the electrolyte kind of flowed. So if you're swimming down 6000 meters at 15 degrees at four knots, you know, you can do the math, but it's a pretty long ride, you know, four to six hours. If you can swim vertical, you know, you can do four or five knots, typically, with a small UV. So, you know, you can get there in you know, an hour or so. But it's it, you know, it's not a free ride. With some systems, you have the ability to put and, you know, basically dropped weights on right, so descent weights, so you can you put a big weight on it, that's, you know, it's an anchor, it's pulling you down, and once you get reasonably close to the bottom, you cut it, and now you're, you know, you got the you got the descent for free. But, you know, back to the point of, you know, neutrally buoyant with these vehicles, you know, it's it's, you're not typically heavy. So you're, you're not getting the assistance of that negative buoyancy to get to that depth without it, you know, something like a descent. Wait,

is there have you seen greater encouragement of pursuing save, like, like Arctic, and then sort of polar work with with the vehicles that you're developing?

There's, uh, there's been a lot of work in that area. I've did a couple projects there around mostly at my time at Bluefin. Actually, right out of the gate with Riptide, one of our first orders was a Coast Guard vehicle, where we went up and did an Arctic deployment on Coast Guard Cutter, Keeley. We had some, you know, unique pictures of the guys going off and a little bit a little graph, you know, throwing those vehicles out in the cold weather gear and, you know, it's there's, obviously there's a big demand, especially the the Arctic, with just, you know, staking claims to the resources that are up there between the folks that are really writer right around there. So Canada's, you know, obviously got to play their US, Scandinavian countries, etc. We got, you know, one of the things we saw, but about coming up on two years ago, one of the things that we got so much attention for, back, you know, shortly after I joined was the inner Shackleton's endurance off of Antarctica. So that was actually found with two of our Sabretooth vehicles will know if you recall, but it was the back of the ship. The vehicle came in and did it was just, it looked like it had gone down like weeks before it had been down almost 100 years and it just pristine. A couple couple things growing on it, but the cold water there really preserved the rack and immaculately well and you know that endurance was right across the back. It was really that that got a lot of attention. That was down in the window. See back in March of 2021 22. Sorry. And you know, they'd been looking for that wreck for years, there was multiple expeditions that went looking for it. And several vehicles actually that had been lost previously on those expeditions. You know, you're talking under ice surveys, cold water, just lots of things that sort of Make it very challenging. Interesting fact that the vehicle that two vehicles went Sabretooth when there were 3000 meter rated, and the wreck itself sat at, like 3005 meters. So it was, you know, you're right at the very limits of where that vehicle could really operate. And, you know, successful, successful expedition a lot of people really happy with how that came out. And, you know, it's great advertisement for us because it had, you know, it was really one of those just classic legendary wreck sort of right behind the, you know, the Titanic,

I imagine it must feel as a builder. It must feel incredible. That feeling when what do you what do you get word that that someone's discovered something amazing using a system that you've you've built? I

actually really so for the record, that vehicle was built out of my by my colleagues in Sweden, and I come on months, sort of after that I live vicariously but I actually I did, I posted something on LinkedIn. And one of my buddies said, like, like you had anything to do with it. And I remember sending him a picture of me and ski gear and goggles and everything saying it was cold. But he's like, there's a chairlift behind you.

Did you ever discover and find something super interesting with any any of your other systems

so probably a little bit of an embarrassing story, but I I lost a vehicle. One of the Riptide vehicles actually early on we had we were testing high speed sort of transits with it. And we had a what the IMU in it kind of, I think, had an orientation issue. So the vehicle thought it was going horizontal and it was going vertical, and it planted itself in the mud. We call it lawn darting. But then we had to go and find it. So I worked. It was actually in Boston Harbor. So I worked with the Quincy Police Department. And they had an ROV not made by Saab. But we went out for a day on the Quincy boat and looking in the area. And I learned a lot actually on Survey and the practical operations of sort of, you know, they use those systems for body recovery, you know, investigations, things like that. But we, we were scanned in there, and we found like an 18 1850s anchor. there that was that's probably the most interesting thing I've found to date. For the record, my retirement plan is treasure hunting, so I hope to be able to answer it differently. If you were to ask me in a couple years,

you mark the coordinates of the anchor and to go back and grab it.

I'm not I gotta figure out the legality of that, because it looked good on the front lawn now.

I'm curious, you have what are some of the companies or organizations to watch with your, your vantage point and and connections across across industry? Are there some entities that are that are just that are doing something kind of maybe a little crazy, but But it's, you know, a tough problem? You

know, there's, there's a lot of exciting companies in the space, I think there's also been some challenges, frankly, for the industry, I think, you know, there's, as I mentioned, there's been a lot of large defense prime acquisitions in the space. And you know, that the Navy, the way the sort of the market works is you sort of needed these programs of record to create a foundation for the business. But the those, those programs record are kind of few and far between, you know, one comes along every couple of years. And then for that particular solution, it won't come back around for almost a decade. So if you can't, if you can't get in, you're, you know, you're kind of struggling to put, you know, connect the dots and connect these these opportunities to get a business base. And there's, you know, there's not as many programs of record right now my opinion is there are capabilities in the in the industry to satisfy. And when you look at the large primes, they, you know, they're, you know, they're not structured to sort of go after, you know, a vehicle sale here to oil and gas or a vehicle sale here to university, they really need these multi 10s if not hundreds of millions of dollar programs. So I think what's, you know, what's unique about SAAB is we, you know, we sell commercial vehicles every day, or movies go out to oil and gas we have, you know, we're selling vehicles down 100 150k kind of price points. So, we're, you know, we work across both the commercial and the defense side, which is, I think, very good from a stability of the business standpoint. There's, there's a couple companies, I think, in addition to Saab, that are really sort of, you know, figuring out how to work commercial model and continue to do sort of some some new development, you know, you know, give some credit to some former colleagues, you know, you look at, and roll and roll has been sort of an exciting company in the space, you know, we don't compete directly with them. They're building some larger vehicles right now. But they've done a lot, obviously, on the, on the air side on the AI ml side. And now on some larger UAVs, with some extra large vehicles going in Australia, and some good work here going on from their acquisition of a company called dive technologies, which is another Bluefin spin out, you know, really interesting company, they had a huge series A or Series B round, I think with like 1.6 billion, so cash rich to suit to play to play in some areas and figure out sort of what's next, but I keep an eye on them.

Have you have you, you know, investigated and things that they call a trans medium craft, like, sort of systems that are able to transition and transition from from sea to air, for example? And what what are the complexities involved in, in sort of going across that threshold? So, yeah, seems like wacky physics.

You know, part of that 30 years, I've been doing this, as you, you know, pretty much tried everything once. You know, it's, it's, I have worked that area, a couple of with a, you know, actually a couple times with a couple of different partner companies out there, you know, the hardest part there, when you start to, you know, go back and look at that, it's that drag problem, right, you're going from, you know, 800 times denser water to air. So, it's a different motor, right, and there's a, there's a couple things there that, you know, I've seen some pretty creative things that others are doing in that space, you know, the way that I've kind of looked at that, the problem you have is, it's really hard to optimize for to drastically different environments like that. So from my view, you know, the sort of a potential solution there is, it's not necessarily a hybrid vehicle that will do both. It's a hybrid system, where you use the benefit of, you know, a plane in the, you know, to drop a UUV. And there's some things there that, you know, I think it's simple, you know, by decoupling the problem, that sort of simplifies it some. But it really, it sort of depends at the end of the day on what you're trying to do, right? If you're trying to, you know, if you spend most you want a system spend 95% of its life underwater and fly for five seconds, you know, that's, that's achievable with a vehicle, right? It's it really comes down to what's the requirement? And what's the, you know, how do you get there, the biggest challenge in this area is, you know, Navy's been a tremendous customer, and they have a lot of, you know, they have a lot of desire for systems and to really push, you know, the bounds of what the unmanned systems can do. But in some cases, it's, you know, it's, without having a basis for what the solution they need is they don't really know how their systems can help them. You know, clearly, there's been a lot of use in like, for UAVs, in mind warfare and things like that. And that's a pretty straightforward problem, they've been using them that way for decades. But when you start pushing sort of these more advanced concepts, and how multiple systems sort of play together, and swarming and things like that, they just, they haven't seen how that system really can help them yet. So there's still a lot of sort of, you know, it's a gray area and until, and that's, you know, one of the reasons we fund some of the, the internal research and development work that we do, it's really, you know, if we think there's a good opportunity here to demonstrate our capability, then that's something we'll throw in on to say, Okay, let's get it to this level, so we can at least give them an indication of what it'll do. And then that's where things start to, you know, drive into new opportunities and new systems and new requirements.

So, what what advice do you have to just aspiring entrepreneurs or just people that want to be involved in the blue tech industry?

You know, it's a, it's, it's a fascinating market, right? It's, you know, where else can you get the opportunity to go hang out at the beach, get on a boat? You know, it's an important, you know, it's usually important when you look at the, the, you know, the health of the oceans and what's their, you know, at the end of the day, it's, you know, how much, you know, how much risk do you want to take, and are you able to take in, you know, going the startup route or going to, you know, large companies the benefits are, you know, it's a stable paycheck, right. But the, you know, the reward isn't there, obviously, from like a new start, or you could get equity and things like that. So, it's really a mix of you know, where you are in your life or you know, what you want to do But there's certainly a lot of companies in the space and you really can get in and any level that you want, when, you know, from a, from a company maturity standpoint,

what skills would you recommend someone pick up that's interested in? Is there a particular area that has like a lot of demand or a lot of opportunity for growth? You know,

I, any engineering skill is highly valuable. And, you know, I can't say enough about, you know, I'm so glad that I went the engineering path, then for, you know, from my education. But from us engineering specialty standpoint. You know, it's, I mean, if you go to the, you know, the basic pay scales, you know, it's hard to contend with software, right, software, AI, ml, those areas are just in such high demand, you know, really across the country. And, you know, I'm, I'm my, I'm a hands on hardware guy, I always have been, but, you know, it's, it's depends where you're, where your passion is, where your skill is. And, you know, there's certainly demand signaling even, you know, non technical roles, like, right now we're hiring, you know, heavily on the production side and the assembly side, there's a lot of opportunities in in their finance and supply chain organizations. You know, it's really the man that, you know, right now unfortunate within Saab, that we, you know, we're a fast growing company in the US, right, we've added hundreds of staff this year alone, and I look at our group, we're gonna be adding another 100 folks or so in over the next year, year and a half. So it's a, it's a good time to be in the space. That's

incredible. And it sounds like you you mentioned loving, being on the beach, on the boat, occasionally in the water? Is it? Is it sort of passe now to send humans? Deep, deep underwater? Maybe we've seen I think recreationally a cooling, because of like the tight submersibles accident last year. But there's still situations where we want a human down there in that that dangerous situation, when there's a lot of incredible, remotely controlled or unmanned systems that could just, I mean, are autonomous systems that can maybe do the job as well, or better? You know, it's

it? That's a great question. I wish I were probably better equipped to answer it. But I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's not too too much different from space, right? You know, you can put up some pretty incredible systems, you get a huge cost benefit when you take the man out of the system and the human out of the system. Because now, you know, what, instead of having to put the life support in there, the safeties in there, and all that, you know, you can put more sensors, more power, more energy more, you know, almost everything else. The challenge becomes, you know, how much capability is really there when, you know, we were made pretty well, right? For being able to assess, you know, challenges problems in the environment, and do all the different things that, you know, you can't always necessarily predict and build the right autonomy AI ml for, I mean, certainly, I think, as we, you know, the next decade is going to be incredible for where the tools bring us and AI ml in particular, and how these systems advanced further. And to some extent, it's probably scary. But, you know, I look at, you know, there's, there's justification to put people, depending on, you know, what the need is, you know, I, I'm not a fan of, you know, deep sea tourism and what happened with obviously, the Titan submersible, you know, I don't, I don't think there was a reason for that, you know, clearly not a reason to, you know, and for five people's lives the way they did, but it's, it's, there's, there are a need to put people underwater, right and put people in space. But that need becomes less and less, I think, as the technology matures,

people got biological general intelligence. So once AI get catches up, maybe maybe the math will change. But I know for space exploration, a lot of it is about his about the human experience and connection. And I would probably argue there's still some place for for tourism underwater just for kind of communicating, you know, the experience and the importance of the ocean to people.

I'll let you know, like I said, I'm an avid scuba diver, and I, you know, I, I think, you know, you look at and really, you know, seen some of the numbers since COVID. The number of divers that are growing exponentially, right people are interested in the ocean and that, you know, have the sort of applications do it safely. But you know, when you start looking at and I mean, there are there's a lot of good submersibles built in the world, right? They're exploring some deep areas. It's mostly science missions. It's not really for the tourism side, there's still some tourism activities happening, but they're focused, mostly shallow, get people in the water. When you look at, you know, historical shipwrecks like the Titanic, you know, should people be going there? That's, you know, there's been a lot of debate there. There's been some collisions with it with prior dives, even from the scientific standpoint, the damage it right, there's, it's, you know, it's a concern.

Yeah, certainly,

for our audience members who are hearing hear you speak in, in in the color, you know, and work of your career. And they're like, like, I want more, are there particular resources, events, certain ecosystems, that that are would be sort of maybe good next steps that people who are who are getting interested in this space but are not experts like you yet that they should should look up and plug into,

um, you know, for naval systems, there's a lot of trade shows, obviously, it depends, you know, the military side, or the more scientific oceanographic research, you know, one of the best shows every year, in my opinion, is in London called Oceanology. It's actually every other year, that's coming up in March timeframe. You know, there's some some conferences in the New England area, blue innovation, symposiums a great, smaller event, networking heavily from the, you know, the New England community from across the board, right, you know, Bluetec, sensors, vehicles, you know, when you look at sort of the bulk of the market, and there's some hotspots, you know, southern Florida, California, that area, but a lot of the this technology really developed initially out of MIT and what's whole, so the corridor in the southeast New England areas, just it's, you know, most every one of my competitors are within 50 miles where I'm sitting right now, right? It's, there's a lot here.

Are there international hotspots also that that you would recognize as like maybe near peer

I think I'd be fired if I didn't say Sweden. Yeah, no. I mean, Sweden has a tremendously strong capability for subsea. And, you know, I, you know, I, I love where I've sort of been able to go in my career, but you know, coming into Saab, and starting out with a tremendous product portfolio really made my life so much easier when when we were trying to start a new sort of division. You know, the UK has a lot around oil and gas and focus and focus there. Europe is definitely growing Bluetec Nova Scotia, up in Canada, Halifax. Dartmouth has a right across the bay there from Halifax, there's the cove Center for Ocean ventures and entrepreneurship. Canada has put a lot into an ocean supercluster in that area, and really seeding a lot of companies and technology incubation to really grow, grow significant capability there. We use a lot of partners in that space, we actually have an office up there. Ya know, it's it's, there's a lot of interests, you know, really across the board, I think people realize that it's an important technology area, there's a lot of blue tech incubators and technology accelerators along the Gulf Coast along Florida. West, you know, West Coast, slot, a lot of capabilities. Jeff,

I really appreciate you helping us to get a sort of 360 view of, of, of the Blue Technologies, particularly the autonomous and undersea work for us, would you would you like to close this off and ask, ask Jeff, to do our tradition.

So Jeff, once again, thank you for joining us on the show today. It's a Tough Tech Today tradition that all our guests say stay tough. So would you be interested in looking at the camera and encouraging our audience to stay tough?

I'm Jeff Smith state up possible. Great.

Appreciate it.

And that's a wrap. So, Jeff, thank you again.

It's really awesome. Thanks, guys. Fascinating

stuff. Hey, it's Jay mill. Remember, check out our sponsor the end effector at E N D. E. F f.com. That's end ewf.com