On Tuesday, five of us from Arcturus attended the Blue Innovation Symposium in Rhode Island, an annual event centered around marine technology and the blue space. This event brought together marine technology experts, investors, and companies, which was a valuable opportunity for us to learn about the most advanced technologies in the blue space field and the future steps of development.

A highlight was that we got to meet Dr. Jim Bellingham, the executive director of the Institute of Assured Autonomy at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Bellingham founded the MIT Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Lab in 1988 which is part of the MIT Sea Grant. After Dr. Bellingham was very happy to share with us his previous experience working at MIT Sea Grant and founding the AUV Lab.

After the speaker panel, we also met many startups with innovative marine technologies covering different aspects of the blue space. Among the companies we met, Juice Robotics mainly focuses on AUV; Net-Zero Edge provides subsea data; Shift Environmental Technology runs various projects on coastal technology and coastal resource management, such as the Coastal Incident Management System that aims to reduce incidents’ impacts; and Sensor Technology produces acoustic sensors.

Seeing how these startups create different technologies to contribute to the blue space also emphasized an important theme of the event — to maintain and even improve the health of the ocean ecosystem. One of the projects that really spoke to this theme was Net-Zero Edge’s data center, which uses subsea data centers that can reduce not only energy costs but also CO2 emissions. It is also our goal to learn from these pioneers in the field and develop autonomous on-surface and underwater vehicles that are environmentally responsible.

Overall, we thought the Blue Innovations Symposium was a wonderful opportunity to meet those interested in the Ocean Engineering space and learn more about where our technology might be applied in industry.