The XPrize Foundation has named 21 semi-finalists for its $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize contest, including Orca Robotics of San Diego.
The XPrize Foundation has named 21 semifinalists for its $7 million Shell Ocean Discovery XPrize contest to advance technologies for deep water exploration, including San Diego's Orca Robotics.
The semifinalists were announced at the Catch the Next Wave conference in San Diego on Thursday, with teams from 13 countries making the cut. Several teams affiliated with U.S. universities are among the semifinalists, including Duke, Rutgers, Texas A&M, Lehigh University, Virginia Tech and Old Dominion.
"These semifinalist teams are on the cutting-edge, pushing the boundaries in developing deep-sea underwater technologies that will work in the lightless, cold depths to fully map one of our world's final frontiers like never before," said Jyotika Virmani, who is overseeing the contest as head of XPrize's Energy and Environment Group.
Teams have tapped technologies ranging from underwater gliders to robotic swarms and autonomous vehicles. Some teams are using artificial intelligence and massive computing platforms in hopes of winning the prize.
The San Diego-based Orca Robotics team is headed by Phillip Rhyner, a 2007 graduate from the University of Rhode Island who works as an engineer at Eddy Pump Corp. in El Cajon.
The 5,000 pound sub-dredge – built initially for oil spill clean-up -- was lowered beneath the ice to find gold on the sea floor. It was featured on about a dozen episodes of the reality show. Rhyner traveled from San Diego to Alaska during filming.
Orca Robotics is Rhyner's side project. He is building autonomous vessels and underwater drones to meet the rigid deep-water requirements of the XPrize contest. He aims to combine phase array radar with computing power to provide results in real time.
According to XPrize, scientists know more about the surface of Mars than they do about the ocean floor, of which only about 5 percent has been explored.
Over the next 10 months, the semifinalist teams will refine their projects for the next round. As part of the testing, contestants must map a sea floor test site that's five times the size of Paris at depths greater than the Grand Canyon. They must find and relay images from at least five archeological, biological or geological features.
After that, up to 10 finalist teams will split a $1 million milestone prize and move on to the finals, where they must operate at a depth of 4,000 meters, map a larger area and find at least 10 significant features.
At the end of the competition, a $4 million grand prize and a $1 million second place prize will be awarded.
In addition to the main XPrize contest, about dozen semifinalists, including Orca Robotics, are also competing for a $1 million bonus prize from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by proving their technology can "sniff out" a specified object.
The XPrize Foundation is a non-profit group that runs contests to push the boundaries of innovation.
Among its current contests is the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize, now in its fifth year. Two finalist teams are building a portable medical device akin to the tricorder of Star Trek fame that can diagnose 13 health conditions and continuously monitor five vital signs. The winner is expected to be named by middle of this year.