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Designed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and made in New Bedford, Orpheus is quite the sea-faring robot. It’s bright orange (for easy visibility), short (under six feet), fairly light (550 pounds), and compact (fits on an airplane). For an autonomous, unmanned, underwater vehicle (AUV), it’s relatively inexpensive to build and easy to deploy. But the little torpedo-shaped robot is a high-performance research tool. In May 2025, Orpheus made its first benthic exploration to collect photos and data 3.5 miles deep in the Western Pacific.
“Orpheus provides autonomous exploration for geo-technical data — it’s a pickup truck for the deep ocean,” says entrepreneur Jake Russell, co-founder and CEO of Orpheus Ocean, which licensed the Orpheus design from WHOI in 2024. Orpheus Ocean, with seven full-time employees, has been headquartered at New Bedford Research and Robotics, where Orpheus was built, since late 2024.
Orpheus, along with ongoing offshore-wind development, signals the dawn of a new “blue-economy,” industrial age in New Bedford. “Eighty percent of the world’s AUVs are built within 40 miles of New Bedford,” says Toby Stapleton, a professor at the UMass Dartmouth Charlton School of Business, and director of the Blue Venture Forum. New Bedford, with the UMass School for Marine Science and Technology, the Port Authority, and the New Bedford Ocean Cluster as drivers, is near the epicenter of a federally recognized Ocean Tech Hub that stretches from Rhode Island to Cape Cod.
Orpheus’ first super-deep dives last May were near Guam, east of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the ocean. Such inaccessible areas likely contain critical minerals. “The abyssal plain visited on this mission is one of the least-known areas on Earth,” said Amy Gartman, lead of the USGS Global Marine Mineral Resources project, one of the dive sponsors along with the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute, based at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography.
Orpheus’ orange plastic shell encases a layer of white syntactic foam, attached to an interior metal frame. Syntactic foam, used on James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger for his 2012 dive nearly seven miles deep, contains tiny, hollow glass spheres suspended in a ceramic matrix. The material is lighter than water, providing buoyancy. Dropped and recovered by crane from a ship, Orpheus uses weights to descend, then drops them to ascend. A thick, glass orb holds the AUV’s brains, which sends signals to a circuit board with wires to control lights, sensors, and thrusters. “Orpheus bridges a critical gap in our nation’s ability to access and explore the deepest parts of our ocean,” says Cameron, movie director and deep-sea explorer, who has dived to the Titanic 33 times.
Orpheus Ocean is a new entry in the burgeoning AUV market space (roughly valued at $3 billion). Its key value proposition is its significant cost advantage over most of its competitors. In addition, Orpheus can be delivered anywhere by plane, thanks to its size and weight — and deployed from a small ship with a medium-sized crane.
Orpheus Ocean does not plan to sell AUVs. Its startup business model is to provide “robotics-as-a-service” for environmental monitoring, underwater surveillance, and offshore-wind and fiber-optic providers looking to lay cables and tethers. Orpheus Ocean has also partnered with Seabed 2030, a nonprofit that is creating a digital map of the ocean floor.
With six benthic dives under its belt, the future for Orpheus and future siblings is exciting. “New Bedford has long been a global leader in catching fish; it could also become a global leader in capturing data,” says Mark Parsons, executive director of New Bedford Research and Robotics.
“If we get this right, in 50 years the blue economy can be bigger than the space economy,” says Orpheus Ocean’s Russell.
Editor’s note: This opinion piece has been updated to correct the number of benthic dives and some descriptions regarding autonomous, unmanned, underwater vehicles.
Nicholas Sullivan is author of The Blue Revolution: Hunting, Farming, and Harvesting Seafood in the 21st Century (Island Press).