Ocean Power Technologies Inc (NYSE-A:OPTT) recently completed a demonstration of several simultaneously deployed Wave Adaptive Modular Vehicles (WAM-Vs) for a department of the US Government.
In addition to triggering immediate revenue, the demonstration showcased the capabilities of the company’s technology to both current and future customers.
CEO Philipp Stratmann joined Proactive’s Steve Darling to discuss the achievement.
Proactive: Your company has been showcasing what your unmanned vehicles can do. But there hasn’t been that cohesion between a number of vehicles. That brings us to this news where you’ve shown that the company can do that and more.
Philip Stratmann: We’ve talked about our ability to work with aerial systems, underwater systems doing survey work and so on and so forth. But what we just completed was truly the first time we had several vehicles operating simultaneously and autonomously and working with other autonomous assets to really, truly demonstrate the ability of any autonomous vehicles operating in tandem, in swarms, whatever terminology you want to use for it, and delivering value for customers.
This was done with a department of the US government. You can’t say who but one thing about government is that they like to see things in action.
Yes. That is what we continue to do is showcase our current and potential future customer base that we stand by what we’re going to do. Putting together these large exercises and field operations helps bring that to light. A lot of planning goes into them and we have operational staff on our side that work with the customer on planning and operating the vehicles during the project. This is all part of this ongoing conversion from pipeline to backlog.
I would imagine that when there’s multiple vehicles involved, the work of the operators becomes so imperative.
Certainly. We’re very happy that we’ve got a very solid team of operators on the vehicle side and the buoy side. They come from military or offshore marine backgrounds, who know how these systems are going to be used by energy customers or the US government or any other customers that we have and can really translate into practice and deliver the value the customer is looking for, rather than just operating the system. They are operating the systems in a way that delivers what our customers are looking for.
Quotes have been edited for clarity and style