Science fiction often paints a terrifying picture of the future—think aliens decimating humanity, à la The War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becoming the present can be pretty amazing—who doesn’t love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?

Or take Earth’s oceans, which are currently in the middle of a technological revolution that, outside of some very nerdy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.

“We’re at the cusp of a proliferation of lots of autonomous vehicles in the ocean,” said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Things that were science fiction not so long ago are kind of routine now.” That includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard, carbon-fiber sail (called a wing) and a stash of scientific equipment.

Droning on

Saildrones are sailboat-like uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) that travel the oceans on wind and solar power, although larger versions do boast a diesel backup engine. Remote pilots who work for Saildrone (the company, capitalized) can guide a saildrone (the USV, not capitalized) via satellite-communicated commands, which provide a designated path, called a corridor, to get to a target waypoint. The drone's software autonomously adjusts the wing to keep it on track (pilots cannot take direct control of this hardware). Using only wind and ocean currents, saildrones cruise on average at about 3 knots, or about 3.5 mph.

NOAA and other science teams commission Saildrone to deploy these scrappy USVs all over Earth’s oceans. Saildrones serve as mobile meteorological stations, biological monitoring devices, and even ocean floor mappers—all without the need for people on board. They can survive terrifyingly tall waves, hurricane-force winds, and seas studded with ice, and they can stay out for months at a time.

“The ocean covers 70 percent of the world, [but] when you think of actual volume, we know so very little about it,” said Noah Lawrence-Slavas, an engineer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL). Saildrones could provide some answers.

Drones at sea

Saildrone offers its craft in three sizes. The Explorer is the little workhorse—a 23-foot-long vehicle propelled by wind that can sail the seas for a year at a time. With sensor packages powered by solar panels, it can monitor meteorology and ocean chemistry, track fish, and/or measure carbon dioxide at the ocean-atmosphere interface. The 33-foot-long Voyager comes equipped with diesel power to supplement wind and solar. It can map the ocean floor to a depth of 300 meters, and it's used for maritime security. The longest, largest option, the Surveyor, was designed for deep ocean mapping, down to 7,000 meters. The first Surveyor was 72 feet long, but new vehicles will be 65 feet in length.

The Voyager and Surveyor have fewer sensor options because their payloads are optimized for mapping and maritime security, but the Explorer can have between 15 and 20 sensors, configured into a customizable package for customers, said Matt Womble, director of Ocean Data Programs at Saildrone.

That sort of customization wasn’t always an option. A little over a decade ago, recalled Lawrence-Slavas, PMEL began to explore ways to replace or supplement ship-based observations, partly because ships are incredibly expensive. In 2014, Saildrone reached out to give a presentation about its concept vehicle's successful voyage from the San Francisco Bay to Hawaii, he said. Autonomously crossing a substantial amount of ocean piqued PMEL’s interest, but there was still a big gap when it came to utility.

“They had a vehicle, but the vehicle didn’t measure anything,” Lawrence-Slavas said. “[PMEL is unique because] we can do things like design a sensor or system from the ground up.” To ease the development of saildrone sensors, NOAA entered into a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, with Saildrone in 2014. CRADAs set out project goals, describe agreements on intellectual property, and streamline paperwork, he said.