HOLLAND – An underwater drone? Really. Three recent graduates of Hope College in Holland have built an HD underwater drone prototype that’s easy to use, highly portable, and fully modular, all for under $600. That’s less than half the price of its closest competition.
The three 20-somethings this week launched a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign to raise $150,000 to take the Fathom One into commercial production. As of Friday morning, the campaign had raised nearly $120,000.
“We’ll sell the Fathom One online after we fulfill orders from our Kickstarter backers,” said Danny Vessells, who hails from Bloomfield Hills. Fathom has hired a contract manufacturer, Edgewater Automation and Development, to build the production units.
Vessells heads up marketing and customer outreach at Fathom. He just received his bachelor’s of science degree in chemical engineering from Hope. After coming up with the original concept for the Fathom One, he brought on two other Hope College students, John Boss, the lead designer from Charlevoix, a newly minted biomechanical engineer, and Matt Gira, who just received his chemistry degree. He handles business development, financials, partnerships, and operations. Gira hails from Washington, Michigan.
What makes the Fathom One so cool is it is modular, so when a new drone model comes out, all the user has to do is remove the thrusters, attach to the base drone and upgrade without buying a new one, Vessells said. Fathom One includes built-in dive lights and an onboard camera that streams video to a smart device. It can be outfitted with a Go Pro action camera as well to shoot 4K video.
Fathom One operates on a 100-foot tether and can stay submerged for about an hour a single battery charge. The biggest difference between it and airborne drones is the Fathom One doesn’t have extra propellers to keep it aloft, Vessells said, which means power consumption is not nearly as high. And, if it does run out of power, the user can just pull it to the surface with the tether.
Already, Fathom has lined up partners to sell the Fathom One in Europe, sometime next year, Vessells said. He also said several U.S. distributors will handle this model as well as future products.
“What’s the right market for this? Do we want to sell at Best Buy or online sales? We’re still figuring that out. But we’ll start online,” he said.
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