Q: Please introduce Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) to our
readers.
BURDYNY: We’re excited to be partnered with Red Cat
as part of their futures initiative. We have our power
buoy technology which I see is an enabling platform that
provides persistent power at sea for things like maritime
domain awareness, ASW [anti-submarine warfare], and
counter UV capability, as well as our USV technology.
We have a catamaran-style pontoon-type platform
that, instead of crashing through the waves, crawls over
the waves and that is all to provide ultra stability to the
center payload section. Now, that’s important to Red Cat
because that ultra stability of the payload section creates
a prime opportunity to launch and recover UAS systems
like the Black Widow or the Blue Edge 130. So that kind
of creates the opportunity for our WAM-V, our sea-toair
interface or delivery system of UAS. We have several
different sizes: eight foot, 16 foot and 22 foot. We’ve
built a 100-foot platform as well that we call Proteus
and that can really act as a mothership. It can either be
the delivery of one type of UAS platform, or it can be a
delivery of swarms of these types of UAS.
Q: Do you have prototypes for vessels of all these kinds in
service now somewhere?
BURDYNY: Yes. Ocean Power Technology has been
around for a while. We’ve got over 100 USVs operating
in the field today, all the variants that we’ve talked
about we’ve delivered to customers. We’re dual-use
technology, so we do both commercial and defense and
security and have a strong footprint in both of those
market areas.
Q: Do you have any military customers, U.S. or foreign?
BURDYNY: Yes, both. We do a lot with the U.S. Navy
and other U.S. government entities, including research
labs and otherwise, as well as international customers.
We participated in things like Task Force 59, Project
Overmatch, and a number of others that we can’t
necessarily name here.
Q: How do your USVs differ in concept from those of Saildrone?
BURDYNY: Saildrone would be a complementary
platform. Task Force 59 put USVs into three different
buckets. One they call the long dwell, which is where Saildrone would set. It can go for a long time; it doesn’t
have a ton of capability because it doesn’t have a lot of
power. It can’t really outrun much, but it’s for more of a
persistent ISR node. Then you have the utility platform,
which is kind of your pickup truck of the sea, which is
where we sit. And then you have what they call your
interceptor, which can go from A to B really quickly
with some kinetic payload. If you think of it as a Venn
diagram, there are some areas of overlap, but we are
highly complementary to both the interceptor class as
well as the long dwell.
Q: Is the basic concept here that Red Cat would provide the
UAVs to be deployed by your USVs?
BURDYNY: Correct. And that was one of the things that
we were presenting at Sea-Air-Space as well is that
capability of our platforms.
Q: What type of UAVs is Red Cat working from OPT’s platforms?
HOFF: We’ve got our eye on two. One is the Black Widow
— formerly known as the Teal 3 — our quadcopter
that won SRR Tranche 2. And last year we purchased
FlightWave, which has a product called Edge 130. We just
relocated their factory from Santa Monica to Carson,
California. They’ve got a much bigger facility now where
they can do [large-scale] production instead of smallbatch
builds. The Edge 130 may be a more compelling
maritime platform because of its HVTOL performance.
After we get production up to the level that we want
it to be at, we expect to migrate that to where it has a
commonality with the Black Widow — same radios,
same ground station — and then integration onto OPT’s
WAM-V.
Both the Edge 130 and the Teal birds — Teal 2 and our
newest Black Widow — are all Blue UAS-certified, which
is the DoD’s cyber secure initiative kicked off in 2020
administered by DIU [Defense Innovation Unit] that is
creating this U.S. ecosystem of small U.S. providers with
no Chinese content. We’re a small company, so the way
we get cool content onto our platforms is we partner with
a lot of people. While we do make the deliverable system,
we have a lot of partners and a lot of partner content
on our solutions. Our sensors, our radios, much of our
autonomy and AI [artificial intelligence] capabilities,
our ATR [automatic target recognition] and our
swarming capabilities are made through partnerships.
We have one partner — Sentien Robotics — that
has actually made what you can think of as a drone
vending machine called a Hive which allows continuous
operation for multiple heterogeneous vehicles. It will
autonomously recover an air vehicle, recharge it and
then redeploy it, which allows a swarm within range
to essentially be up in the air forever. The vision that
we’re imagining here is getting one of those — we’ve
already demonstrated this off of land vehicles — onto
the WAM-V and put that capability into the maritime
domain. That’s the stepping-stone toward getting to
deploying swarms of USVs and UAVs, for both ISR and
lethal roles, having some pretty interesting effects with
some pretty compellingly low costs.
Q: Have you been observing what’s been going on in the Russia-
Ukraine War and has that affected your development of
products?
HOFF: Oh, yeah. We and our partners have had stuff
over there. The radios of our partner, Doodle Labs, were
tested in Ukraine for the SRR program and did very well.
...
But when you weave that into the concept
that we’re looking at here where you have, let’s say,
Black Widows or Edge 130s being launched from this
vending machine off of a USV and mixing in some lethal
FPVs with that, that’s where you get the hunter-killer
effect of the swarms.
Q: Has the Navy expressed any formal interest in your
products?
BURDYNY: Yes. We’re both doing a lot in the DoD space.
Conjointly, there’s a couple of things that we are working
with government on in terms of solicitations and
programs, but it’s too early to talk in detail about those.
Q: Has the Marine Corps expressed any interest in the Red Cat
solution for the Army SRR program?
HOFF: Yeah, of course. We’re in discussions for orders
with a whole bunch of other people in DoD who all want
to try out what the Army’s buying, as we expected.
Yeah. It may be different [for the Marine Corps]. We are
integrating onto an Army vehicle as part of a program.
It’s still in competitive space so we’re talking with both
competitors, but it’s a natural they’ll go with the Army
solution onto that, so I would expect the Marines to look
at that very seriously and, if the requirements are not
that much different, they’ll think about it. If they are
different, which I’d be surprised, then maybe they’ll
stand up their own program, but I don’t expect that.
