Buying guide
Bedrock AUV vs Saildrone USV (Explorer / Voyager / Surveyor) in 2026
Comparing 2 humanoid robots across availability, pricing, capabilities, and verified deployments. Current as of 2026.
| Attribute | No image on file | |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Bedrock Ocean | Saildrone |
| Form factor | maritime | maritime |
| Maturity | commercial | commercial |
| Availability | internal-onlyenterprise | internal-onlyenterprise |
| Price | Not announced | Not announced |
| Capability claims | — | — |
| Brain | — | — |
| Verified deployments | 1Bedrock Ocean | 1National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration |
| Privacy practices | — | — |
| Sources on file | 6 | 8 |
Editorial summaries
Bedrock AUV
Bedrock's AUV is the commercial-subsea-survey entry of the maritime cohort: an autonomous electric undersea vehicle for seabed mapping and offshore survey (wind farms, cables), paired with the Mosaic cloud-native data platform. It operates independently underwater on inertial navigation with onboard edge compute, neither towed nor tele-piloted while submerged. Bedrock is a US Public Benefit Corporation, and its pitch is unit economics: each AUV costs under $1 million, and the company frames two AUVs as covering the same ground as one mapping ship. It is sold to offshore-survey operators, not consumers; there is no consumer price, and the sub-$1M figure is a B2B unit cost, not a consumer price.
Saildrone USV (Explorer / Voyager / Surveyor)
Saildrone (founded 2012 in Alameda, California by Richard Jenkins) is the canonical commercial autonomous-surface-vessel company and the captive data-as-a-service archetype of the maritime category: it owns and operates a fleet of wind- and solar-powered uncrewed surface vehicles and sells data and outcomes, not vessels. The line spans the 7-meter Explorer (ocean data), the 10-meter Voyager (coastal defense and mapping), and the 20-meter Surveyor (bathymetric mapping), with a 52-meter diesel-electric hybrid Spectre announced in 2026 for 2027 delivery that departs from the wind-and-solar identity. Customers include NOAA, the US Navy's 4th Fleet (counter-narcotics and illegal-fishing patrol), and Denmark's EIFO, and backers include a $100M Series C, a $60M EIFO round (May 2025), and a $50M Lockheed Martin strategic investment (October 2025). DEPLOY records it at commercial maturity, the most mature commercial surface-autonomy player. A significant cap-flag applies to its cumulative-mileage figures, which are inconsistent across its own channels: the defensible primary anchor is the October 2023 milestone of 1,042,620 nautical miles, 32,438 days at sea, and 136 vehicles; larger 2-to-2.5-million-nautical-mile figures are claimed, not verified. Because it sells data on service contracts and does not sell vessels, there is no consumer price.
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