WaiV Robotics emerges from stealth to launch the first autonomous at-sea drone landing platform

Mar­itime autonomous infra­struc­ture devel­op­er WaiV Robot­ics has intro­duced the first ful­ly auto­mat­ic land­ing and take­off plat­form designed to enable reli­able VTOL drone oper­a­tions even in high sea states. 

Backed by $7.5 mil­lion in seed fund­ing, the com­pa­ny’s sys­tem enables UAVs to oper­ate from ves­sels as small as 10 meters and decks of any size, with­out any hard­ware or soft­ware mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the UAV. WaiV’s patent-pend­ing catch-lock-release land­ing mech­a­nism, com­bined with AI-dri­ven pre­dic­tive algo­rithms, enables safe and pre­cise drone recov­ery even while ves­sels are in motion on the open sea.  

While air­borne drones have become increas­ing­ly capa­ble on land, oper­at­ing them at sea intro­duces a dif­fer­ent set of chal­lenges. Off­shore, the land­ing sur­face is in con­stant motion, shift­ing unpre­dictably with sto­chas­tic wave pat­terns that make a ves­sel deck far less sta­ble than any­thing on land.

Instead of a UAV approach­ing a fixed land­ing pad on shore, the drone must adapt to a sur­face that is con­stant­ly mov­ing (six degrees of free­dom) and may also be salt-cov­ered and slip­pery upon con­tact. Until now, exist­ing solu­tions have been lim­it­ed to calm waters or lab con­di­tions, leav­ing off­shore oper­a­tors hes­i­tant to deploy UAVs, espe­cial­ly from small­er ves­sels. 

John­ny Carni, Founder and CEO of WaiV Robot­ics, said: “For drones to become a reli­able part of off­shore oper­a­tions, the miss­ing piece isn’t the air­craft, it’s the infra­struc­ture around it. Our sys­tem was designed to remove tra­di­tion­al deploy­ment con­straints, allow­ing fleets to oper­ate as mobile launch and recov­ery hubs that ensure reli­able UAV oper­a­tions.

“With­out a depend­able way to launch and recov­er at sea, large-scale deploy­ment sim­ply doesn’t work. Our goal is to remove that con­straint and make drone oper­a­tions viable from vir­tu­al­ly any ves­sel.” 

WaiV’s approach cen­ters on the infra­struc­ture need­ed to sup­port reli­able UAV oper­a­tions with a land­ing plat­form designed to oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly of human input under dif­fi­cult sea con­di­tions. Designed to sup­port the full mis­sion cycle from take­off through recov­ery and land­ing, the sys­tem includes: 

• Sta­bi­lized land­ing infra­struc­ture: Through AI-con­trolled soft­ware and spe­cial­ized algo­rithms, a gyro-sta­bi­lized plat­form effec­tive­ly “takes over the sticks,” guid­ing the drone via its remote con­trol and elim­i­nat­ing the need for an expert pilot dur­ing land­ing
• Impact absorp­tion and secure cap­ture: The land­ing pad absorbs impact on con­tact, while a lock­ing mech­a­nism secures the UAV’s skids to pre­vent bounce, slide, or roll-off in high-sea con­di­tions
• Broad VTOL UAV com­pat­i­bil­i­ty: Designed to sup­port any type of VTOL UAV, includ­ing mul­ti­copter, fixed-wing, and heli­copter plat­forms, regard­less of the man­u­fac­tur­er

Designed to scale across a range of oper­a­tional needs, the plat­form sup­ports UAVs up to 15 kg, with plans to accom­mo­date small­er air­craft car­ri­ers as small as 3kg and larg­er car­ri­ers weigh­ing 100–300 kg.

The sys­tem sup­ports WaiV Robot­ics’ goal of mak­ing UAVs a viable option for off­shore fleets that have tra­di­tion­al­ly faced deploy­ment con­straints.