Scaling underwater drones requires rethinking the supply chain

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 21:40

   If you had come to a venture capitalist 10, 12 years ago, for some, maybe six years ago, and said, hey, we are going to verticalize manufacturing. We are actually going to build things in the U.S. We're not going to outsource them to Foxconn or Shenzhen or whatever. And for those components that seem like the supply chain might be dicey, we will literally make them from scratch so that we control everything, the entire vertical stack of our device.

2. 22:10

   That would get you shown to the parking lot. So how verticalized are you guys and where do you start? Where are you going to? It's this kind of iterative process that we've kind of, you know, The first vehicle has maybe 80% pieces off the shelf and we're on like generation five now. And the next generation, particularly over the course of the next year, we're going to bring a lot of it in-house. So to make an underwater drone, you can kind of break it up into the MEC, the ELEC and the software.

3. 22:39

   The software, all of that is pretty much from scratch in-house. We're not really building on top of any other primitives. We've kind of built it up from the ground up because we're building a very different type of vehicle. The modularity requires a lot of interesting things. But presumably those hardware actuation frameworks that you use, like? Yeah, like there is things, but frankly, we've kind of just like eschewed a lot of them.

4. 23:00

   There's things you can, there's like OpenRAWs and there's other like, there's like, yeah, there's a few different ones. But yeah, we're eschewing a lot of them and kind of building a lot of them from the ground up, because our vehicle looks a lot different to a lot of other underwater robots. and then there's the elect so like in that like you've got like sensors and then the internals of the vehicle so a lot of the you know if we talk about the sensors and that sort of thing there's a you know how do you how do you perceive you know it's like you're typically using like a sonar system of some description again right now that's off that's bite we're buying them off the shelf our sonar systems but we're kind of just hiring and building up our acoustics team now to start building them in house and sell from next year then the navigation stack as a part of this

5. 23:42

   kind of like part of the vehicle, there's inertial navigation systems. Again, right now we buy them off the shelf, but we've got internal prototypes that we're going to start building in-house ourselves and replace these existing suppliers. It seems very hard to build an inertial navigation system in-house. Explain how an inertial navigation system works. There's different ways of building them. You've got fiber optic gyros, which is one way. You've got MEMS sensors, which are in your iPhone or whatever, that are kind of like accelerometers that you can use as well.

6. 24:16

   and we're so I won't go into the how we're building ours but yes initial prototypes initial prototypes on our initial one is a put it at a fraction of the price of the very expensive long lead time supplier that we're using right now and building our supply chain that we could scale well but I'm curious why build your own inertial navigation is it cost is it lead time is it like Ultimately, you need to get the device or the robot.

7. 24:44

   For us, it's scale, lead time. There's about 20 million aerial drones built every year. There's maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. For us to really fully manifest our vision, we need to be building millions of underwater drones. Therefore, we look at supply chains and we're like, can we build on that supply chain? So insofar as we can, we try to build as much on top of electronic vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains where we have to buy from somewhere else, or consumer electronics supply chains where things are made in the order of millions and not maritime supply chains.

8. 25:15

   So you're building at a small scale with an eye towards a very large scale and everything needs to have a plan for how you operate at that scale. We will open a facility next year that could be one of the largest by a number of units, like underwater drone facilities, like factories in the world. So like, and I think there's a decent, like right now where our company is right now, our main problem is building things.

9. 25:40

   We are saying no to contracts. We have more demand than we can supply. The things that we think about on a daily basis right now are not like, how do we sell more? It's how do we build a factory? And how do we vertically integrate some of these parts of the stack? Like, for example, there is one part of our supply chain that we kind of baited out of the supplier how many of these components they make per year right now, and they make like 100 to 200 per annum i mean like that's you know like there's no way that we're hoping to make a few hundred vehicles next year yeah maybe a thousand um so it's like we can't build on top of that we find this all the time it's both with our companies and our