Underwater Drones, Mars Rover Parts and a High-Tech Revival in NYC | Hacker News Reader

Underwater Drones, Mars Rover Parts and a High-Tech Revival in NYC

nytimes.com

50 pointsdankohn111 comments

Surprising to hear them survive for 4 years, a 150k investment is not gonna last long in new york city

A lot longer then in SF, you can find housing for not too much if your willing to look outside of Manhattan

Manhattan (aka. New York County) is twice the size of San Francisco County. Couldn’t you find somewhere affordable if you’re willing to look outside San Francisco County as well?

What is Duro's business model? Who wants to buy underwater drones, or pay them to survey areas? My understanding is Liquid Robotics was acquired by Boeing (and their business model transformed from academic research to military defense) because they couldn't make the business model work. Of course Duro is trying to make it cheaper, but I'm still curious who their target customers are.

This is not a criticism - I am actually really curious about this space.

Seafloor mining, pipeline inspections, wildlife conservation, fiber optic links, ship inspections, port monitoring, de-mining...

The unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) industry is already fairly mature. These guys in NY are competing against large, established companies that already acquired reasonably successful startups:

Teledyne (Gavia)

General Dynamics (Bluefin)

Kongsberg (Hydroid)

L3 (Ocean Server)

BAE (Riptide)

Subsea is a massive market. Companies are making a lot of money in subsea with the oil and gas sector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsea_(technology)

Seems like a pretty thin article that doesn’t contextualize the push for manufacturing that has been going on in NYC for the past 5 years, through orgs and networks like NYCEDC or Futureworks, etc.

While I always appreciate such initiatives, it look like they are going too slow. In a few years time...There will be dozens more doing the same.

I dont see how these guys will survive with the remus 600 and 100 vehicles established.

I'd say there's some room for competition with:

- cheaper vehicles (not "crazy-expensive")

- easy to integrate/extend (modern software practices...)

- more varied domain applicability (not everyone looks for pipeline leaks/hunt mines for a living)

- fast reactivity, rather than moving at the speed of government

I'd wager cheaper/better hardware & other improvements means orgs will be able to get fewer, cheap underwater robots.

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