Autonomous boats built in downtown Nanaimo are creating ripples across the marine technology sector.
Shift Coastal Technologies is the brainchild of biologist-turned-entrepreneur James Spencer, who saw a need for marine vehicles that could get into dangerous shorelines that would be risky for crewed boats.
Prior to developing autonomous vehicles, Spencer worked as a consultant with the mining industry and First Nations.
But when he found working in the corporate environment “stifling,” he opted to “pull the ‘chute” and applied for an Innovations Solutions Canada grant that could help him design a boat that could be used to clean up plastic debris arriving on the B.C. coast that drifted across the Pacific Ocean after an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011.
What he discovered was getting into isolated coastal areas to pick up garbage and debris also meant dealing with dangerous shoreline sea conditions.
“It was when I was doing that work that I said, holy, this is crazy dangerous,” he said. “Like, why are we using boats and people? And that’s when the light bulb kind of went off … There’s got to be way to do this with remote systems or un-crewed systems and not put people in this really dangerous surf zone to pick up garbage.”
Spencer created a prototype boat in his garage that could be operated remotely, but because he doesn’t have an engineering background, he said it wasn’t very good. However, early demonstrations of his ideas led to connections with engineers and developers long associated with robotics and remote submersibles, and also with grants and other funding sources.
Shift Coastal Technologies was founded and five years of development has produced products that have found civilian and military applications.
“Now we’re really cooking with fire, I think, because we’ve got contract vehicles with the armed forces,” Spencer said. “We’re doing exercise design and development down in Esquimalt with the navy, so that’s really exciting because it’s all about building something that creates an operational advantage. You’re not just building something because it’s cool … It’s really interesting time in the autonomous vessel world because it’s such an emerging industry.”
Spencer said the future of maritime warfare lies in creating hybrid fleets of manned vessels combined with unmanned marine vehicles. Specialized designs are developing and evolving to fill niche applications and capabilities through research and practical experience, he said, similar to what has happened with aerial drone technology.
Port security, environmental monitoring and response, marine conservation and protection, marine infrastructure work, as well as military applications are among the services Shift Coastal Technologies currently provides with its range of vehicles.
The OceanSled Explorer is the company’s advanced autonomous uncrewed surface vehicle, capable of navigation and load carrying. It also works in an integrated system with other crewed and uncrewed vessels, and can work in surf zones, rivers and estuaries. Shift also produces a smaller rapid deployment autonomous transport vessel, an incident reconnaissance and intelligence aerial drone and the Coastal Intelligence Management System, which is the software platform that provides awareness, planning and decision-making capability and integration with Shift’s vehicles and other commercially available autonomous systems.
“It’s really a platform that can deploy sensor suites below surface and above the surface – we can launch aerial drones from it, almost as a sentry – it’s almost an eyeball on the water for covert or, sort of, overt operations,” he said.
A myriad of tasks can be carried out by the system, which Spencer calls a “force multiplier” that can provide extra eyes and ears and other capabilities beyond the limitations of human staff.
“It’s just allowing them to do more with less…” he said. “The dangerous and the boring – that’s what autonomous things do really well. Why would you want someone to inspect a boom all night? It’s very important because you can set a boom to contain oil, but who’s inspecting it to make sure it’s actually doing its job and who wants to do that all night?
“It’s dangerous and it’s boring, so make a robot do it and use your people for something else.”