0 m
Surface Drones
Autonomous surface vessels (USV) — hull design, marinized propulsion, ArduRover autopilots and long-range telemetry over water.
Active program
Marine technology · est. 2026
Machines for the ocean.
Black Anchor designs and builds autonomous marine systems — surface drones, underwater vehicles and the AI that pilots them. Every build is documented and published as open research.
Marine dronesAUVMarine AISonarField-tested
Dive
Systems
What we build
Six programs, one direction: machines that operate at sea on their own — and come back.
−50 m
Underwater Vehicles
ROV and AUV platforms — pressure housings, thruster control, tether management and navigation without GPS.
Active program
−100 m
Marine AI
Perception and autonomy at sea — object detection on embedded GPUs, sensor fusion, and mission planning that survives real conditions.
Active program
−200 m
Sonar & Sensing
Acoustic sensing, echosounders, bathymetric mapping and the signal processing needed to see where cameras cannot.
Active program
−400 m
Marinized Electronics
Salt, pressure and vibration proof — potted PCBs, waterproof connectors, corrosion-aware design and low-power endurance.
Active program
−600 m
Field Operations
Slipway to open water — deployment procedures, recovery systems, sea trials and everything that breaks the first time out.
Active program
Research log
Latest research
Build logs, sea trials and experiments — published as they happen.
Underwater Vehicles
3 MIN READ
18 JUN 2026
Designing a 100 m Pressure Housing on a Workshop Budget
PVC, acrylic and epoxy versus 11 bar of seawater: how we designed, potted and destructively tested the electronics housing for the Lamprey micro-AUV.
#auv#mechanical
Read
Marine AI
3 MIN READ
30 MAY 2026
Running YOLO on a Jetson for Real-Time Buoy Detection at Sea
Training and deploying a YOLOv8n model on a Jetson Orin Nano to detect buoys, boats and swimmers from the Remora surface drone — with the glare, spray and horizon problems nobody's dataset includes.
#marine-ai#usv
Read
Surface Drones
3 MIN READ
22 APR 2026
ArduRover on the Water: Tuning a Differential-Thrust USV
From zig-zag shame to straight lines: parameter-by-parameter tuning of ArduPilot Rover for the Remora surface drone — steering rate, L1 navigation, speed control and what wind does to all of it.
#usv#ardupilot
Read
The dry dock
On the slipway
What's being built, tested and broken right now — and the rules we build by.
01
Design for salt water
Everything corrodes, floods or fouls eventually. We design assuming it will — then test until it doesn't.
02
Autonomy over remote control
A tether or a radio link is a single point of failure. The goal is always a machine that decides for itself.
03
Publish everything
Schematics, failures, sea-trial logs. Every project ends as a research note anyone can build from.
// build-status Live
BA-01 · Surface drone "Remora"
Sea trialsBA-02 · Micro-AUV "Lamprey"
Pressure testingBA-03 · Sonar buoy network
PCB rev. BBA-04 · Vision autopilot stack
Dataset & training> Full build logs published in Research_
The Logbook
One dispatch per new research note. Sea trials, failures, schematics — straight from the water. No noise.
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