Kym: Can you give some background about how you and Ocius came into being?
Robert: In 1996, so 28 years ago, and I was 38 years old, there was a solar boat race on Lake Burley Griffin and I was a just spectator and noticed all the boats had their solar panels flat on the deck like solar cars, or in ways when the wind picked up were not very seaworthy and even a hindrance, and all the teams were trying to beat each other by having 3% better hulls or solar panels or motors etc.
I don’t know why, but I started thinking about how you could build a solar boat that could angle its solar panels to the sun as the boat went round the lake and if there was wind, it could sail and if there was a storm, how it could be seaworthy. I sort of got a bit obsessed about it and after about 6 months I rang up the judges and said, “Can I enter a boat where the solar panel also acts as a sail” And they said, ‘hell yes – we’d love to see that!’
So, with a bunch of sailing and surfing friends from Ulladulla, we entered a prototype ‘solar sailor’ boat the next year that won the race by 30 kilometres in a 60 kilometre race. It was a fantastic team effort and great result which we celebrated but nothing really happened because who cares right?
Then in June 1999, I met some people who said, “We should build a ferry for the Sydney ‘green’ Olympics.” So, we started a company called SolarSailor, raised some money and built the Solar Sailor Ferry that started operations with Captain Cook Cruises for the 2000 Olympics and in 2001 won the Australian Design Award of the Year.
For the next 10 years we successfully operated it with Captain Cook Cruises carrying tens of thousands of passengers and meanwhile, Hon Bob Hawke became our Chairman, and we sold a number of other ferries in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Kym: That’s quite a history.
Robert: Well yes, but then in 2008, the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) hit and the whole idea of a ‘green ferries for blue highways’ business collapsed. Oil was $30 a barrel and there was a lot of secondhand diesel ferries going cheap. We entered a long and hard ‘valley of death’ but we did manage to keep working, finishing building some ferries and running a tourist solar sailor ferry on Lake Macquarie.
Around then, we got this inquiry from America: could we use our ‘solar sail’ technology to build a platform that could go to sea ‘indefinitely’? The answer of course was Yes. So, we built some working prototypes and put some non-working ones on display at Indo-Pacific 2013 and got interest from DSTG and Thales for their potential as an ‘ASWUSV’ (anti-submarine warfare USV) platform. We applied for a number of grants and in 2015 we got an innovation contract under the previous CTD, Capability Technology Demonstrator program.
This was the beginning of a new chapter for Ocius. We sold the solar ferry, changed our name to Ocius and started building our first Bluebottle Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV), BRUCE which was 19’ and designed by Sydney naval architects 123 who are the guys who chopped up Wild Oates 11 every year to win the Sydney Hobart yacht race a record 9 times. They had designed our ferry
for Shanghai and understood what we wanted. It had our first ‘reel in keel’ winch for a thin line array which we demonstrated successfully in 2017 and again at AW2018. There was a gap in 2018 where the CTD program closed and the Defence Innovation Hub started up, so another lean time, but at the end of 2018 we received our first Defence Innovation Hub (DIH) grant. The DIH wanted us to demonstrate an ‘intelligent network’ which we did by building a second 19’ Bluebottle BOB and teaming with BRUCE working with the UNSW Computer Science Department who had the world champion ‘UNSW robots that play soccer’.
Then in March 2020 we got our second and last Defence Innovation Hub which was huge for us – to build five (5) Bluebottles to operate ex Darwin. The week we signed this $5M contract for five Bluebottles Covid lockdowns started. In retrospect, COVID had a silver lining for us in that we had time to think and do our first major design review increasing the Bluebottle’s length from 19 foot to 22 foot, vastly increased payload space and particularly the size of the keel winch.
COVID also taught us from Day One, Ocius had to be ‘vertically integrated’ to deal with logistic supply chain issues. We had to be able to build hardware and write software to run whatever sensors or computers we could get.
In 2021, as per our contract, we were operating in a box 80 miles from Darwin, off Melville Island and we got AMSA approval to operate unescorted anywhere in the EEZ. I said ‘There’s nothing happening here, let’s head left …and so we sailed off to Ashmore Reef about 400 NM away and for the next 3 months unofficially, again because of COVID causing difficulty crewing conventional boats, we were there informally working with Border Force.
When our DIH contract officially finished in March 2022, ABF said, ‘keep going’ and the DIH extended our contract till the end of 2022 and included trials at Rowley Shoals and Christmas Island.
At the end of 2022 we got a procurement contract from Navy for 5 BBs, then 3 more in 2023 and then in June 2024 this year an order for another 7, bringing the total of RAN owned Bluebottles to 15. On Nov 26 2024, we Christened BB712 being #12 and this was our first grey Bluebottle or ‘Greybottle’ because they have been recently approved as Navy Registered Vessels, which means the Bluebottles can go wherever the Navy wants them to go and we thank all the Navy people involved as this was a massive achievement.
Also, the Royal New Zealand Navy leased a Bluebottle last year and now have signed a contract for two which are also grey and the first one we also christened last week.
As well, during Autonomous Warrior 2023, we met a well respected US company called ThayerMahan founded by ex-submarine admirals and Captains. They bought 2 Bluebottles in May 2024 and have just ordered another four.
This means we have 11 Bluebottles to deliver for Aust, NZ and USA in the next 6 months, and we’re operating boats 24/7 ex Darwin, and we have won another contract with Marine Parks Australia for another mission over summer and we’re moving factories and we’re hiring another 18 people taking our workforce of 70, so, we’ve got a bit going on right now!
Kym: I’ve got a few just very basic questions about the technology, which you probably get asked at every show. What happens when a Bluebottle encounter really bad weather?
Robert: There are a lot of Sydney to Hobart and match race sailing world champions working in Ocius and I grew up mucking about in boats and sailing and at uni was mad sailboarder. Anyone who knows the ocean knows you can’t just be a ‘fair weather’ sailor or sunny days and smooth seas, you have to have skills and ability to handle rough waters or storms – and rough waters and storms is where you learn those skills. So, we all know in our bones that a % of the time, Bluebottles do not want their sails up and do need to be able handle extreme conditions – so uniquely and in my opinion critically, the Bluebottle can stow its sail onto the deck completely, so it disappears with zero windage but doesn’t take up any cargo space.
And, at the bow, we have this unique ‘rudder / flipper’, which in nice weather gives us nice steering and wave propulsion but in large seas acts like a sea anchor, so that with zero energy going into the boat and the rudder facing forward, the bow comes around into the conditions and bobs up and down head on into the swells.
We’ve been tested many times. Recently off the
East Coast of USA, in that period of 4 cyclones in a row, BB BETH was transiting from Virginia Beach to Connecticut and experienced 10 days of 35 knot plus winds 24/7 Seastate 6 + conditions, even with the solarsail down, ripping the top 2 solar panels off the sail, but she rode it out and when the weather came good and the sun came out, she popped her sail up, charged up her batteries from 24 to 28V and sailed and motored home.
At Autonomous Warriors, because of scheduling of assets months in advance, we operate on the days scheduled, so we’ve been off Jervis Bay deployed in massive East Coast Lows, with winds constantly over 35 knots, recording peaks of 49 knots maintaining the Bluebottles in a small area with arrays out for days in a row.
I think growing up in Australia, we’ve been shaped by our unique maritime environment— lovely sea breezes, yet also strong Southerlies, ripping currents, and suddenly changing conditions. Combine that with the inherent Australian culture of balancing risk and reward, a touch of good management, and a bit of good fortune, and the result is remarkable: we have pushed the boundaries of what was thought possible, and we haven’t lost a Bluebottle yet… touch wood.
Kym: I was scarred forever from being forced to go sailing in miserable conditions when I was a child. Do you ever end up finding yourself hundreds of kilometres off course?
Robert: When BETH was off Connecticut recently, we did get pushed backwards about a hundred miles over 10 days. There was not much sun to charge up batteries, so we had to ride it out and when weather cleared, we got back on course. Thayer Mahan enquired about sending a crewed ship out, but no crewed ship would go out saying are you crazy? So, that’s how bad the weather was. Overall, it depends on the mission length, amount of sun and the amount of batteries you want to burn. Most of our missions now are 30 to 60 days up north in off Darwin and with 10 hours of sun a day we have plenty of power to do it sustainably.
Kym: Now if hypothetically, you come across an illegal fishing craft or something like that, is it a real danger that some enraged fisherman is going to come alongside with an axe and just take to the Bluebottle with it?
Robert: Hypothetically… we do have pretty good situational awareness from radar and cameras, and our AI is getting better so our humans don’t have to watch every camera and every radar on every boat all the time. If they do see an enraged fisherman or other contact, they get the BB to send back lots of pictures. If the fisherman sees us and approaches, we can put our sail down and blast the horn and head back towards Australia at 6knots. Running away at 6 knots blasting our horn is not a bullet proof solution but it gives honest people the idea. On the Marine Parks boat we’re fitting a load hailer so we can issue warnings, and I’d say we’ll eventually roll that out on all boats up North.
If an enraged fisherman really did want to get to our computers, he’d have to hold on with one hand wielding an axe with the other and chop through three layers of fiberglass – the solarsail, the solar deck and then the real deck. So he’d have to be a pretty determined and meanwhile, of course, we’d be calling for backup and depending on instructions from our customer we’d be deleting files.
Similarly, if someone in a large ship really wanted to steal a Bluebottle they’d have to lift a 1.5 tonne boat out of the water and meanwhile we’d be calling back up and deleting files. And we can see a large boat like that at 10NM way before they would see us. With our sail down, at 400 plus metres we are quite hard to see, but we can detect on radar and classify on zoom cameras at far greater distance than that.
Kym: On the technical side of things, what sort of sensors can you carry and what are your communications links
Robert: Above the water sensors standard are 360-degree cameras, pan tilt zoom (PTZ) camera, and radar. We are trialling several other sensors above the water with Navy and under the water we’re working with Thales, SonarTechAtlas and of course, Thayer Mahan in the USA to carry sonar arrays and trialling hydrography equipment on a boat in Bass Strait right now which I’ll talk about in a minute but our AI is getting better, such that we can take a radar detection and automatically take a zoom camera shot of it day or night. If we detect something and it doesn’t have an AIS transponder on, we notify the customer and then either stay low profile or go in and try to classify.
Kym: With the camera, are we talking day-night capability? What sort of communications links do you carry?
Robert: Yes, we’ve got infrared cameras on some Bluebottles. They’re way more expensive so it’s just a matter of what the customer wants… At Autonomous Warrior, we were trialling some cameras worth half a million dollars on the Bluebottles.
Regarding comms, we’ve got remote control, wifi,radio,4G, low bandwidth Iridium Go satellite, high bandwidth, high orbit Certus stellite comms. One of the exciting things is that we’re living through effects of Moore’s Law, with sensors and communication systems getting better and more powerful all the time. The most recent disruptive Moore’s law sort of thing has been Starlink low orbit satellites where the cost of the antenna is $700 compared to $13,000, the data rate is 30 times greater, and the ‘phone plan’ is 20th of the cost.
That’s just an example. So now all Bluebottles have Starlink and Certus high bandwidth satellite service, low bandwidth satellite, radio, 4G and wifi and the Bluebottle just automatically goes to the fastest one or the most available.
If we do lose comms, which happens regularly for our boats ex Darwin, the vessels automatically try to find another form of comms but if none is available, they just continue their mission. They are autonomous and although sailors love tweaking them, they sail themselves and work out where to put the sail and when to tack and when to lower the sail, so you don’t need to sail them. If the comms are down the Bluebottle will continue its mission for a preset period of time and when comms comes back on line they update each other with their ‘world view’.
If the comms do not come back after a preset period of time, which could be a week or a day but currently we set at 1hour, the Bluebottle will autonomously sail home following ‘breadcrumbs’ home which is checked by the human watch officer at the beginning of every shift. This is so we don’t run into reefs or islands on the way home as a USV can’t just follow a ‘bee line’ home like a UAV.
Kym: Okay. And with your arrangement with the RAN, are you selling them the platforms or are you providing a service?
Robert: We’re selling the vessels to the Royal Australian Navy and then we’re providing the service to operate them mostly. With the Royal New Zealand Navy, we’re selling them the boats and supporting them operating them, with training, maintaining, sustaining and updating the platforms.
Kym: What is the CONOPs and how many does Australia need?
Robert: Good questions. I think you’d better ask RAN! CONOPS, I think it’s clear Bluebottles are a ‘trip wire’ or ‘fire alarm’ system cueing crewed responders. We also have a deterrent factor in that if bad actors think that if they come down into Australian waters illegally, they might get ‘stung’ by a Bluebottle, this alters their behaviour of what they might do and where they might go.
How many Bluebottles does an operation need? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for, what sensors you have, what is the Sea State, what probability of detection you want and what else is in the intelligence ‘network’.
Kym: You’ve mentioned the US. Are they taking serious interest?
Robert: Well yes. US Company, Thayer Mahan are saying they have ‘searched the world for the best persistent USV’ and they have found the Australian Bluebottle’. In April they demonstrated 2 Bluebottles off San Diego during a trade show with their sonar array Outpost System and post demonstration they bought both. They are great partners and we have been supporting them doing more work off the US East Coast. They’re using them for marine mammal monitoring and doing trials with their Navy like we do at our Autonomous Warrior Games. They’re currently buying another four Bluebottles.
Why? The USA has similar problems we all do except on a 10X bigger scale. Bluebottles have competitors in America, but we’ve shown in war games our Australian product is unequivocally superior because we can stow our sail, carry a large winch, use wave power and launch from a boat ramp. So yes, we’re getting serious interest in the USA and the more drones and mass effect we can get out there with ‘attributable’ or expendable assets together the better.
Kym: I think you’re increasing your rate of production, is that correct?
Robert: Our current rate of one per month and we have to increase to one per fortnight to meet our current order book and by July I’d like to be ready to build one a week. Today, I signed a lease on a new building 3X bigger than our current facilities about 10 minutes from here. We’ve had this great relationship doing research with the University of NSW (UNSW) since 2015 and they are this fantastic source of well-trained bright young engineers and for some reason many of whom are also great sailors. But we’ve run out of room, and with operations and orders in front of us, it’s time for Ocius to move, or as someone said, it’s time for Ocius to graduate!
We’ve also invested in a new mould. The old mould was designed to build 5 and built 17 so our boatbuilder said it’s falling apart, we need a new mold so if we’re investing in a new mould that could build the next 300 Bluebottles we better get it right and so we’ve been through another redesign process from everything from the ground up. These new 2.0 Bluebottles are now 6% bigger with better performance, but not losing our low logistics so that it still fits on a trailer, fits in a 40 foot shipping container, and can launch from a boat ramp.
Kym: Now when you say you’ve gone up a couple of feet knowing and loving the Americans as I do, they really seem to like things a lot bigger. Is it scalable if they said, look, yeah, this is fantastic, but we want something that’s 10 times the size and can carry a missile?
Robert: Yes but right now I am really focused on us ‘sticking to our knitting’ – building the best persistent over the horizon USV in the world. At 24 feet, we’re at the limit of what you can tow around behind a car and launch from a boat ramp and we’ve got great capability at low cost.
BTW – we do have designs for a 38-foot Bluebottle which could take 3 tonnes of the sorts of payloads you suggest OR we also have a thing we call ‘Shipmate’ that can loiter and then do 40 knots and a whole bunch of other things …
…and oh yeah, right now we do have a diesel hybrid Bluebottle BATHY off Bass doing hydrography with well-respected company BMT together looking at the idea of how we might sell Data as a Service (DaaS). These boats are also 24’ and from space or a plane or a boat they look like any other Bluebottle. That’s the good thing too about making them all the same. The more 24’ Bluebottles we build for non-defence, the more BBs can be out there and people can’t tell what they’re doing.
Kym: I know BMT quite well.
Robert:: They’re great partners. Like Thayer Mahan, they have great engineers and a great culture. The diesel hybrid boat off Bass Strait has a multi-beam echo sounder, ADCP, and AI on cameras and other sensors with Starlink to send back the data. It’s going really well and with 400 litres of diesel fuel in the keel means it should be able to do 30 days of ‘mowing the lawn’ with the propeller at 3% -60% throttle, and 800 watts going to the multi-beam plus 200 watts going to Starlink.
Kym: With the new variant, the extra 300 kilos, what are you going to do with that?
Robert: Kym, basically whatever, the customer wants. Batteries, sensors, computers, UAVs, magnets, taller comms mast etc—you name it, we’ll make it happen. And if they don’t use it, we get 30% better righting moment so the boat sails better, plus the longer waterline length gives us 0.2 knots ..all for free so it’s a win-win.
Kym: I assume you’ve got some sort of mission computer onboard the thing that’s lowering the sail when required and all of that sort of stuff?
Robert:: Our Bluebottles are fully autonomous sailing systems, and everything is built and programmed in-house. At the heart of the system is the autonomy box, which means you don’t need to know how to sail to be a Ground control operator as a Bluebottle takes care of everything. As said, many of our team are keen sailors, and they enjoy testing and refining the system to make it even better, but you don’t need to know how to sail.
Kym: You’ve been talking in terms of 30- day endurance. What happens? What’s the limiting factor? Why can’t you stay out there forever?
Robert: We are now up to 30 to 60 days now without too many problems. The boats are all antifouled now and coming back with fairly clean hulls which is the main limiting factor, but the cameras or sensors that are under the water that you can’t anti foul do get really badly affected by fouling.
Because we’ve got three forms of renewable energy, solar, wind, and wave energy, if we lose one and the mission’s not critical, we can bring the boat home itself. The software is getting really good at predicting if something might fail. In the past something would just suddenly fail… but now the Ops team can be warned that a sensor or a motor is using more power or less power than it should. It might have water in it, it might have a fault, it might not have been plugged in correctly, the connector might not be right, whatever, and they can bring the boat home before it fails critically.
Kym: And what’s your sort of average turnaround time when one comes back from a 30- or 60-day mission? How long to clean everything up and get going again?
Robert: I’d say at the moment, it’s about four or five days, but everything is getting better. We’ve only been set up in Darwin since July. We’ve now got local Darwin staff, and we have Ocius FIFOs (fly in fly out) making up a team of four or five people on the ground there. For example, today we launched two boats and recovered one boat on the same high tide. As you know, the tides up there are massive, so we are like Captain Cook, we sail at high tide so our routine is very strict.
Kym: Any final anecdotes about strange encounters with fishing boats or anything like that?
Robert: Back in 2019 when we only had 2 Bluebottles BRUCE and BOB with not much autonomy, AMSA were working with us and asked if we could put 2 Bluebottles on the lake for a week during a world conference they were hosting …of course on autonomy. The paperwork to deploy on Lake Burley Griffin was enormous and a risk assessment ha to be done which identified the highest risk was rowers at 6am, because they are going fast and facing the wrong way. Our clever risk mitigation strategy we came up with was, I’d talk to the rowing Association about Bluebottles and they’d issue a heads up / warning to all the clubs on the lake and every morning at 5 am we’d bring the bluebottles into a bay where we could have direct ‘eyes’ on them from the penthouse room in a hotel London Circuit. So, at 5 am each morning, we’d bring them into this bay and watch them and every morning the rowers would row by and always stop and have a look, and you could see them having a big discussion about the Bluebottles with each other and then they’d row off. By about the 3rd morning, one crew decided to come right over and one rower tried to poke a Bluebottle with an oar. I was watching through binoculars and said to the operator – quick blow the horn and back away – which we did.
Later that morning, I got a call from the rowing club president. Expecting a complaint, I braced myself but instead I got a big apology for the ‘poking incident’ and effusive compliments about how “absolutely amazing and intelligent” the Bluebottles were. Naturally, I didn’t correct this.
The one thing I would finish with is the Bluebottle was originally designed as an anti- submarine warfare USV. While we develop that, we are fortunate the Bluebottles also have other capabilities and jobs and war games we can do such that we’ve now clocked up more than 74,000NM which is 3.5X round the world at the equator or a third of the way to the moon. Nothing improves learning and reliability better than having boats at sea. Our people, instead of worrying about launching and recovering, are operating and updating the software, data processing, the predictive algorithms I talked about with the health of the boat, the autonomous sailing, the automatic detection using AI, all that sort of stuff. It just gets exponentially better by being used so we are ready for what comes next.
Kym: I’m glad you mentioned ASW because yes, I was going to bring that up. I’m sure you are more cost effective than crewed platforms.
Robert: Regarding costs we happily quote what I call ‘pub’ numbers or rough numbers. These, of course, vary but it’s gives people a rough idea for planning. So, a Bluebottle’s price from us is about AUD$1M ($US670k) and we’re striving to keep it there as we scale up. We know that’s a lot of money but there is no one on board so they can be thought of as one of many attritable or expendable assets so if you lose one it’s not a disaster. Operations works out to be around AUD$3,000 – 5000 (US$2k-3.5k) depending on where you want them, when you want them, how long you want to do it, how many you want, the contract types etc, etc. Bluebottles, of course, can’t do all a crewed ship can do, but what they can do, they do 24/7/365 and they don’t get bored or tired or sick.
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