Anahita Laverack
The fully autonomous, wind-driven robotic vessel collecting ocean data
The fully autonomous, wind-driven robotic vessel collecting ocean data
Anahita Laverack’s business combines her love for the sea and sailing with her passion for engineering.
Oshen makes fully autonomous, wind-driven robotic vessels for remote ocean sensing. Anahita’s idea came to fruition when she struggled to find sufficient ocean data for her Master’s thesis.
After attending several conferences, she also realised that a lack of affordable, accurate ocean data affected a huge proportion of the market – and that the technology she’d been working on could become a solution to this problem.
Her long-term vision is to use her robotic vessels to fill in the data gaps within the oceans. The data can then be used for a wide variety of applications, including shipping route optimisation, fishing, weather forecasting, climate change research and more.
Anahita now has two prototype vessels that are currently being tested in the Irish sea. Having just secured an Innovate UK funding grant, the next six months will involve using these vessels for acoustic sensing.
“Our vessels will be everywhere where ocean data is sparse, helping fill in the gaps. We will then take our data, combine it with other ocean data available (for example, from drifting buoys or satellites) and use it to produce accurate forecasts and maps of important quantities in our oceans,” she says.
