New Greensea company to manage amphibious seafloor crawling robots

Marine robotics technology specialist Greensea Systems has launched Bayonet Ocean Vehicles, a new company created to develop, manufacture, and distribute a line of amphibious robots recently acquired from C-2 Innovations.

The deal includes the acquisition of the IP and inventory of C-2 Innovations’ crawling robot product line, which has been rebranded and launched to market as the Bayonet 150, Bayonet 250, and Bayonet 350 vehicles.

Bayonet joins the Greensea group of companies as an independent entity managed by the Greensea executive team.

Founder of C-2 Innovations Arnis Mangolds joins Bayonet Ocean Vehicles as VP Programs and previous C-2 Innovations’ principal investigator employee Mike Farinella takes the role of senior engineer.

The company is based in Plymouth, Massachusetts, co-located with Greensea, in a newly renovated 17,000 square feet manufacturing facility with waterfront access for year-round testing and training.

“We have been working with C-2 Innovations since 2018, providing them with a C2 software suite built on OPENSEA. The seafloor crawling robot systems they developed are unique because they fill a void in autonomous ocean systems as they can work in the surf zone and carry larger sensor payloads on the seafloor,” said Ben Kinnaman, founder and CEO of Greensea and Bayonet.

“Bayonet has the resources to scale and advance the product line, and strategically, the crawler product line complements Greensea’s autonomy portfolio for defense applications.”

With Greensea backing, Bayonet Ocean Vehicles has begun larger-scale commercialization of the seafloor crawling robot product line, which will feature Greensea’s fully open architecture software platform OPENSEA, which includes precision navigation, payload integration, autonomy, and over-the-horizon command and control.

The company will launch a commercial variant of the platform in the summer, focused on hydrographic surveys, wind farm surveys and maintenance, as well as coastal dredging support.

Deployable from land or water, the range of Bayonet crawlers have been designed to transit along the ocean floor as well as on land, making them the only robotic platform in the world capable of working between 40fsw and the dunes on the beach as well as in the deep ocean, Greensea said.

Their application includes amphibious operations and littoral warfare such as mine detection and clearance, seafloor, beach zone and river surveys, environmental, monitoring and wharf inspections.

Bayonet Ocean Vehicles’ vice president of operations Rich Amirault said: “Because the conditions that these vehicles operate under – very shallow water, heavy surf, and poor visibility – are the perfect environments for improvised mines, providing an autonomous solution for EOD missions is a necessity. We are building vehicles to go where boats, divers, and ROVs simply cannot go, using software that is proven on thousands of vehicles.”

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