The war in the Ukraine, and the recent sabotage of the Nordstream underwater pipelines in the Baltic Sea, is bringing increased focus on the growing demand for underwater technologies capable of providing seabed intelligence, when and where it is most needed. Kraken Robotics Inc., Canada’s Ocean Company™, is squarely focused on this market, with a suite of technologies that greatly enhance image quality and significantly reduce the time of traditional seabed surveys, providing actionable seabed intelligence in a timely manner.
Kraken’s KATFISH™ system has been recently demonstrated at several international Naval exercises. It showed an ideal combination of Kraken’s rapidly deployable high resolution seabed mapping with a robust launch and recovery solution for high sea state operations on vessels of opportunity.
KATFISH is gaining significant traction in the defense and commercial markets as a solution providing an incredible value proposition for seabed intelligence. KATFISH is a high speed, actively stabilized Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) towfish that operates at speeds up to 10 knots.
The high-speed capability, and constant resolution of KATFISH greatly increases Area Coverage Rates (ACR) by providing more useable data than traditional Side Scan Sonars. KATFISH provides range-independent constant resolutions of 3 cm x 3 cm and area coverage rates (ACR) of up to 4 km2/hour, with swaths of up to 400 meters, including simultaneous full swath 3D bathymetry. With post processing, a 1.9 cm x 2.1 cm constant resolution imagery is available.
KATFISH has been successfully integrated and deployed on over a dozen unique manned and unmanned vessels ranging in length from 12m to 80m. This included technology demonstrations in the United States at the Advanced Naval Technology Expo (ANTX) and Trident Warrior, at the WISEX event in the United Kingdom, as well as sales and integration with government defense customers and prime contractors in Israel, the United States, Germany, Poland, and Denmark. By the end of 2022, Kraken will have delivered six KATFISH systems to NATO Navies, as well as spare parts and comprehensive training programs.
Our KATFISH technology is being quoted for numerous defense contractors and navies in a range of defense industry bids in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. These current, or soon to be released, tenders represent several hundreds of millions of KATFISH revenue opportunity to Kraken over the next 5 years. As our customer reference list grows, and we demonstrate strong performance with reasonably priced systems, our momentum in the marketplace is increasing.