Meet EvoLogics, developing sub drones that pass data with sound - Defense One
EvoLogics GmbH is a private high-tech enterprise with headquarters in Berlin, Germany. The company designs and manufactures underwater information and communication systems, as well as hydroacoustic sensors. Its core values are rooted in bionic concepts that combine state of the art engineering with the best ideas found in nature.
EvoLogics was launched in 2000 with a small group of scientists and R&D experts, aiming to develop innovative technologies for maritime and offshore industries. To solve the common problems of transmitting data underwater, the team turned to dolphins - the ocean’s ’talking nation’ - known to use a wide variety of acoustic signals to efficiently communicate in the most challenging underwater conditions. The resulting EvoLogics S2C spread-spectrum communication technology grew into a whole ‘ecosystem’ of products that now includes several series of underwater acoustic modems, underwater positioning systems (USBL, LBL, SBL), networking protocols and developer frameworks, as well as novel robotic solutions.
SAN DIEGO—A flash of fiery reddish orange caught my eye as I was speed-walking through WEST 2024, the Navy’s annual IT conference: what looked like a cute little drone boat a tad bigger than a toddler’s walker, and some matching red-orange baubles.
Francisco Bustamante, EvoLogics’ director of operations and sales, explained that it was a suite of tech, including a surface drone and nodes to build a WiFi network underwater.
D1: This is a data network that uses audio?
BUSTAMANTE: We started working with different products for underwater data transmission. That was one of the key technologies that we developed because there was basically no solution. Wi-Fi doesn't work. You can use optical systems, but they are also limited to the turbidity. So for any long-range communication, you need acoustic systems.
You can use this as a technology to enable the operation of unmanned underwater vehicles, or even for manned vehicles...to position them underwater, and to transmit data to the surface.
Now that we have these enabling technologies, we have moved to other concepts. We are developing autonomous vehicles for different survey applications. We started with a survey vehicle for the surface, which is a sonar boat. It can perform different missions depending on what payload sensors that it has. We have single-beam and multi-beam echo sounders for water depth. And we have front-looking sonar and sidescan sonar to do, basically, object detection.
The object detection we have included technologies with AI. In order to automate, we work with pre-trained datasets. And then the vehicle can look specifically for certain types of objects, for example, in assisting a police force looking for missing persons in water bodies or for finding mines in shallow waters, coastal areas, and so on.
So you’ve developed a surface vehicle and underwater connectivity. Next, is an unmanned underwater vehicle this year?
Yes, this vehicle can also carry different payloads and support survey missions. But the advantage being that it can also navigate closer to the floor, seafloor. And also it can obtain better resolution of the images or even, with support of the cameras, can go and look at some specific items that have been found. The important thing is that you always have a limitation in terms of communication underwater, even with our technology—and any technology basically—you have limited bandwidth. So you cannot be sending video and streaming on YouTube.
What kind of data can you send?
Text messages or text files. We can even send images like pictures, but single frames. So in that case, it's important that the systems—and this is something we have focused a lot on—that the systems can work autonomously and have enough intelligence [so] if the vehicle detects obstacles, that it's capable of avoiding them, if the vehicle detects objects of interest that it will communicate that information in a reduced way in terms of data size, but still giving the operator the opportunity to maybe change the mission and return to that point to have a closer look.
Any detection that is made by the vehicle is already geotagged. So any further inspection—for example, sending a diver—can be much more easy, easily done, than if there was only a detection without knowing where it was.
What is the range of the surface vehicle, the underwater vehicle, and the underwater communication network?
The surface vehicle can travel up to 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) on one battery load. Normally, it's not going to travel that distance linearly. It searches [in] a grid pattern, so it covers a certain area. But that's basically the linear distance it can travel.
This vehicle can also do about the same distance: about 40 kilometers underwater. This vehicle is relatively small, so it's about one-meter-10 [centimeters] or so, so it's very, very compact. And the idea is that you can easily deploy it. But on the other hand, we have the capability, thanks to the communication and the positioning, to operate multiple vehicles at the same time in coordination, so that you can act as swarms and cover a larger area in less time.
We have prepared a toolset that allows us to configure different solutions depending on the customer needs. For example, for port security, we can have different surface vehicles, underwater vehicles, sensor stations, that can then as a whole, create a detection network that can be used to prevent, for example, any kind of foreign vehicle that is in the area, or divers and so on, this can be configured in flexible ways depending on the requirements.
So the network that goes along with it covers that whole 25 miles?
The acoustic devices will have different ranges, depending on the frequencies that we're using. The longest range is up to seven miles, so 10 kilometers, with the lowest-frequency devices. Medium range is 3.5 kilometers. And then we have high-frequency devices that can do up to one kilometer. But they can work, also, in network configuration. You can place multiple nodes in a larger area and they can communicate among themselves, transmit the data doing relay chains, or mesh networks in order to get the relevant information to the surface.
Is there open architecture so a customer like the U.S. Coast Guard could use systems they already have?
We have implemented the JANUS acoustic standards, which was developed by NATO, the CMRE Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation. And this has already been implemented in our modems. So it's a feature that we can deliver out commercially. We also are participants in the SWiG—Subsea Wireless Group—acoustic standard. They are part of the oil and gas industry...they have already developed a standard based on JANUS, but they are working on the next-generation standards to increase the bandwidth available and so on. So these standards will also be supported by our modem so that we can interact with any other modems that support basically the two available standards at the moment. Moving forward we will always be supporting the standards.
In terms of open architecture, we have some interesting developer options built into our devices. We have a sandbox, this provides a virtual environment to the user, which allows them to run their own applications in our system. With this, they also get lower-level access to some of the modem features including the medium access control and can be used for testing networking features, and networking protocols.
We also have a SDM—software-defined modem—which allows the users to basically play with any arbitrary waveform. If another company has some waveforms that they use for their own communication purposes, and they prefer to use that, they can use our modem as hardware.
Are you working with the U.S. military yet?
We have sold some products—in particular the modems so far; they are developing some projects. So hopefully we'll hear from them soon if their experimentation is successful.
What are your plans for the rest of this year?
Very important is the launch of the quatrain autonomous vehicle with the first project pilot customers, where we will be testing the capabilities basically to the limit.
We are participating in the REPMUS exercise in Portugal in September with NATO to test different scenarios with them, in which we will also be testing and presenting the interoperability of all the components into one combined and comprehensive system that is also able to provide the data in the formats that is needed for the mission control by NATO. So this will be happening in September, and we hope that it will be very successful and will lead to new ideas and further development projects for us.
Bionic Solutions for Underwater Communication
EvoLogics GmbH, Germany
EvoLogics GmbH is a private high-tech enterprise with headquarters in Berlin, Germany. The company designs and manufactures underwater information and communication systems, as well as hydroacoustic sensors. Its core values are rooted in bionic concepts that combine state of the art engineering with the best ideas found in nature.
EvoLogics was launched in 2000 with a small group of scientists and R&D experts, aiming to develop innovative technologies for maritime and offshore industries. To solve the common problems of transmitting data underwater, the team turned to dolphins - the ocean’s ’talking nation’ - known to use a wide variety of acoustic signals to efficiently communicate in the most challenging underwater conditions. The resulting EvoLogics S2C spread-spectrum communication technology grew into a whole ‘ecosystem’ of products that now includes several series of underwater acoustic modems, underwater positioning systems (USBL, LBL, SBL), networking protocols and developer frameworks, as well as novel robotic solutions.
EvoLogics Today
In 2016, EvoLogics remains a close-knit team of 32 employees. The company’s main business is solutions for underwater communication, positioning, navigation and monitoring applications. EvoLogics S2C R and S2C M lines of underwater acoustic modems and positioning systems cater to various scenarios and provide a high degree of customisation as is shown in Figure 1.
To offer cutting-edge technology, research and innovation have been an essential part of the EvoLogics DNA since the company’s inception - the company is an active collaborator of several EU-funded R&D projects and encourages academic efforts of the employees. EvoLogics’ range of hardware and software developer solutions includes an open-source framework for underwater networking and targets scientists and researchers worldwide.
Current development is focused on intelligent integrated solutions extending the capabilities beyond communication and positioning into telecommunication centres and robotics.
Commercial Products
EvoLogics exports to international markets both directly and through its established distribution network. The company’s key clients are offshore companies, fisheries, commercial service providers, state- and privately-funded research facilities and universities.
EvoLogics bestsellers are underwater acoustic modems that provide a highly reliable bidirectional data link along with acoustic positioning, broadcasting and networking. Applications range from retrieving data from subsea sensors and navigating unmanned underwater vehicles to deploying complex underwater sensor networks for monitoring and exploration. USBL and LBL positioning systems, coupled with EvoLogics positioning software (SiNAPS), are gaining popularity among the clients, see Figure 2.
EviNS (the EvoLogics intelligent Networking Software) is the company’s framework for developing, testing, debugging and implementing underwater acoustic network protocols and customer-specific applications. Besides seamless integration with EvoLogics underwater modem hardware, EviNS is fully compatible with EvoLogics modem emulator (available as an online service and as a hardware box) that makes it possible to work with a virtual network of underwater acoustic modems, significantly reducing time and cost for network protocol development.
EvoLogics is active in marine robotics - its communication technology is implemented in the company’s unmanned surface vehicle, the Sonobot. Available as a commercial product since 2011, the Sonobot was initially developed as an easy-to-deploy bathymetric survey vehicle for inland and harbour waters. Equipped with EvoLogics S2C-technology echo sounder, the vehicle has since been tested for LBL baseline calibration and mini-ROV deployment (Figure 3).
Research and Development
EvoLogics’ ongoing R&D efforts focus on underwater acoustic communication and positioning for distributed underwater networks.
EvoLogics is part of the SWARMs (Smart and Networking Underwater Robots in Cooperation Meshes), an EU project focused on cooperative operation of unmanned underwater vehicles. Project collaborators aim to design a set of unified software and hardware components that will allow integrated operation of different UUVs, linked into a multimedia sensor network for various automated missions.
Another important project is WiMUST (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology), where collaborators focus on engineering an intelligent distributed underwater array of marine robots for seismic acoustic surveys.
One of EvoLogics’ recent R&D efforts in robotics is the BOSS (Bionic Observation and Survey System) project, a joint research effort, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). BOSS’s goal is to create a powerful and flexible underwater exploration and monitoring system, particularly suitable to access hard-to-reach or yet unexplored areas with its unique functional properties.
Deployed in the target area for observation and survey, the BOSS system is a self-coordinating swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), all linked into a multimedia sensor network with the latest communication and navigation technologies. The AUV is the project’s core innovation - engineered and built at EvoLogics, the experimental bionic vehicle is modelled after a Manta ray and can move through the water by wing-like movements of its “pectoral fins”.
View on the Future
The EvoLogics philosophy of constant innovation defines the company’s key directions for future development.
The team is working on expanding the functionality of EvoLogics underwater acoustic modems and positioning systems, and is soon to introduce atomic clock integration that will allow synchronisation with unprecedented accuracy. Constantly improving cost and time efficiency is the goal set for future hardware and software upgrades of the main product lines.
Underwater ’internet of things’, allowing for intelligent cooperation between various vehicles and sensors, is the concept that guides EvoLogics’ research and development team working on underwater networking protocols, a rapidly evolving field gaining momentum worldwide (Figure 4).
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