- This is a wind-powered race car,
and it's the key to penetrating the eye of a hurricane.
No...for realsies.
This innovative sail design is taking us
to the last real frontier on Earth: our oceans.
Why do this?
- We've mapped less than 20% of the planet:
We really don't know what is out there,
how did the oceans are, or what is under the oceans.
- The fact that we know so little about it
and a lot of our future depends on it,
is kind of staggering.
- Firstly, we need people to understand
the value of the oceans:
We have to measure it to understand our trajectory.
- A better understanding of the ocean
might seem abstract to you,
but don't say that to anyone
living in coastal areas around the world,
where a hurricane or sudden decline in fish stocks
could make the difference between life and death.
These folks are building a network of ocean-going robots
that can monitor the ocean for 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
- We can operate these pretty large vehicles
with less power than an incandescent light bulb
for months or years at a time.
- This is real-time data.
This is measurements that were happening
seconds ago in the open ocean.
This has previously been impossible.
- Oceans cover the majority of our planet,
and they're pretty much off limits to humans.
I mean, there's nowhere to stand,
and it's very wet,
but what if these sailing robots could change all that?
This is "Hard Reset,"
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
The story of these ocean-going robots starts here
in the desert.
That guy is Richard Jenkins, and even though
that sounds like a name from a fake ID, it's not.
He's a real dude who likes to go real fast.
He worked for years to break the land sailing speed record-
which is also a real thing.
- 'Woohoo!'
- 'You're the man!'
- What made his speed record possible
was this sail design.
- In 1999, I set out to break the wind-powered
land speed record for wind-powered vehicles,
which I thought would be easy-
took me ten years to do that.
I had a number of very close calls,
and I almost died two or three times.
You guys are pros. They normally make me clap for that.
So with wind power, more wind doesn't equal more speed,
so it's a real engineering challenge
of lift, drag, and efficiency.
It's yielded a technology of this wing system
that has enabled a new capability to explore a planet.
- By adapting Richard's sail design
for use on the ocean,
these Sail Drones can be completely powered
by the wind and the sun.
Solar panels provide electricity for the computers
and sensors inside, and the sail design allows them
to sail all over the world with just wind
providing all the motive force.
- The Sail Drone uses sailing principles:
It is a sailboat. It captures the wind to go forward.
It just uses a very efficient wing to do that.
It's very much like an airplane,
rather than a tail to control lift,
to control pitch of the airplane,
we use a tail to control the angle to the wind.
So it's a self-trimming, self-controlling sail
that uses very, very low power to provide propulsion
for the boat indefinitely.
Being solar- and wind-powered is great for the environment,
but it's also great for maintenance.
These robots can stay out at sea for months
or even years without needing to refuel,
and when they do need some sprucing up,
they just sail themselves back into port-
kind of like this.
Hey, sir, you can't park there.
You can't park there, sir!
Pirates...
- This is what our smallest vehicle is called,
"the Explorer."
Saildrone Explorer is 23-feet long,
weighs about 1,500 pounds.
You know, these boats could sail indefinitely.
It's just very hard to stop barnacles,
mussels, and weed growing on that.
So every twelve months you bring it back,
you clean it off, and you relaunch it.
That's really the only maintenance we do.
- And the fact that these drones
don't rely on diesel engines
or make much noise at all really
means that sonar signals are much clearer.
- The thing that people often get distracted by
because we have such cool drone technologies,
you have this bright orange kayak with a giant wing
on board, is the data that we're collecting_
this is ultimately what we care the most about.
- The sensors these drones carry provide
a ton of other information about the ocean.
They can tell us about temperature changes,
CO2 concentration, pollution, wildlife activity, weather,
anything you can think of-
and they can do that more affordably
without putting human lives at risk.
This opens the door to a future where we can monitor
all of our oceans in real-time.
- So right now we're going to our mission controls.
We have three mission controls around the world:
One in San Francisco, one in the U.K.,
and one in Perth, Australia.
That is because they're 8 hours apart,
so we can do 24/7 watches as we pass
through different time zones.
This is where our mission pilots sit-
everyone's watching missions around the world.
We have about 10 to 20 missions going on,
about 40 to 50 boats deployed any one time.
So drones as a whole have become much more feasible
and possible due to the advance in electronics.
Cellphones, small IMU's, INS systems-
they give you orientation, GPS-
they come down in orders of magnitude from 10, 20 years ago,
big, heavy, expensive things
to very small, very cheap devices.
So we've got big systems that have been miniaturized
and enabled technologies like Saildrone to exist.
So what it's doing, it's carrying a large multi-beam sonar
that is putting sound into the water
and listening for the response.
So you ping into the water and with the response
you can tell how deep it is, what features are there.
So it's a very high-resolution map to the sea floor
in areas where we had literally zero data previously.
- How high resolution?
Just like 1 meter squares, half a meter squares, 3 meters?
- The resolution depends on the depth.
Imagine an arc from the surface.
The deeper you go, the bigger the squares get.
In shallow water, it's very, very precise,
maybe centimeter accuracy,
and when you're looking at 8,000 meters down,
it's probably hundreds of meters per pixel.
- Sending humans out to the middle of the ocean
to gather this data is expensive and dangerous.
You can get storm, icebergs,
or even Kraken.
That last one might be an exaggeration.
Anyway, that's probably why we've mapped
less than 20% of the ocean floor,
but with autonomous-mapping technologies,
we could have a complete map of the ocean by 2030.
- The drones don't care how long they sail.
They don't have to come back for Christmas,
they don't have to come back for any family obligations.
They're able to just sail out there,
do as long of a mission as necessary,
and then either be serviced there remotely-
if it's something that we want to be looking at
over a certain number of years-
or you could send another drone to take their place,
and your mission could continue unimpeded
because the data streams just get merged together.
- The big leap I want to see
is full global coverage of vehicles.
With full coverage of the ocean we can do many things:
Firstly, under the water looking at the seabed.
Understanding seabed is crucial for geophysics,
circulation, understanding where the carbon goes,
where the heat goes, what's happening to our things
like our fish stocks.
Above the surface there are many, many threats
to people and to wildlife.
Past five to six years we've been using sonars
to assess how many fish do we have to set a limit
that the fishermen can catch sustainably.
Most of our stocks are declining
due to changing ocean conditions and overfishing-
hugely important for long-term management of our fish
and our economy.
- All this data would be impossible
to gather with humans crewing ships.
But with autonomous ships like Saildrones,
we can do this and more.
We can start to gather data from places
where we'd never dream of sending a human.
Unless, of course, that human is Lieutenant Dan
from "Forrest Gump."
- 'You call this a storm?!
You'll never sink this boat!'
- All our drones are operated remotely.
Right now, we're actually going through
with one of our vehicles;
we're going through one of the hurricanes
in the Atlantic Ocean.
So this is a real-time thing,
this is not actually staged.
This is a real vehicle that's seeing
about 88 knots of winds,
that's almost 100 miles an hour winds.
So the ocean is a very, very tough place to exist.
I think it's a lot tougher
than being underwater or in space.
The secret sauce of Saildrone is using aerodynamics
to provide thrust with very low drag.
So in a hurricane, if you're able to survive in those winds
and sending them out to get data,
it really transforms our understanding of the physics
behind how the storms form and how they grow.
At the top here we have the hurricane charts.
This is one of our drones
going through a hurricane right now.
This is about 80, 90 knots of wind,
over 100 mile an hour winds.
15 to 20 meters waves, so huge waves, huge winds,
and doing a great job of surviving, hopefully.
- Hopefully is an interesting word
to end that sentence with.
- This technology's roots come from extreme
and crazy places.
Racing is a discipline of pushing yourself to the limit,
where you're on the verge of constantly crashing.
That's not a comfortable place to be,
but it is where you learn the fastest.
- Working on a very small budget,
pushing the limits, pushing the risks-
going to the Arctic, going to the ice age,
sailing into hurricanes.
You learn so many lessons during that time;
it really evolves technology very rapidly.
- A technology developed in extreme environments
is naturally comfortable there,
and it takes our understanding of the world to places
where we'd otherwise never be able to reach.
- In 2019, Saildrone started off on a mission
to circumnavigate the entire Antarctic continent.
It's super hard to operate down there.
It's one of the worst parts of the planet,
given the icebergs, the huge waves,
the terrible wind and temperature conditions.
- We are able to use these drones to do a mission
that takes almost an entire year
only on the power of the sun, the wind, and the waves.
That's it!
- We're really trying to understand,
is the Southern Ocean a carbon sink or a source?
We discovered the ocean isn't always a sink-
sometimes it's a source, and that has a huge impact
to the actual carbon models that are being used
to sort of understand what climate change looks like.
You wouldn't send a crew of people into the Southern ocean
during the winter.
You just frankly wouldn't put human life at risk,
and you could do that very easily now with Saildrone.
- So, picture a scenario
where these ocean-going drones
have finished mapping the ocean floor,
and scoot around keeping an eye on things.
For one thing, we'd have a much better understanding
of our climate and our weather.
The ocean floor has a huge impact on currents and winds,
and the data about the surface of the ocean
could tell us how our atmosphere is changing over time.
- My vision is that we quantify the planet
using Saildrones.
The amount of data is basically unlimited,
and even though we have probably the biggest data set
collected on the ocean so far through drones,
it's definitely still not enough.
We need more and more drones out there,
we need to cover our planet.
- Imagine being able to predict the weather
accurately weeks or months in advance.
It wouldn't just help you to plan your ski vacation.
It would save lives-
lots of them.
- You could save thousands and thousands of lives,
whether they be from tornadoes, from fires,
from lightning storms-
so we wouldn't necessarily be able to prevent
these events from happening,
but if you could prepare for something
with two-months certainty, imagine what FEMA could do
or what the United Nations emergency respondents
would be able to do.
- It would mean we could monitor
every aspect of the ocean's health,
from pollution to fish populations.
It would help us get back in touch
with something that has been a mystery for too long.
- The difference we can make
with this technology is exponential.
So rather than making a very, very small difference
and very slow progress,
we can produce big changes very quickly.
There's not enough truth in this world.
There's stories, there's fake news,
and if we're making big decisions on climate and policy,
taxes and renewables, you need a sense of truth
to guide those decisions.
We can only do that at a fraction of the cost,
one or two orders of magnitude cheaper:
That enables people to make correct decisions.
- The ocean is the cradle of life
on this planet.
It's literally given us everything.
It seems only fair that we give it a little more attention.
Come back next time for another episode of "Hard Reset."
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