Kraken establishes German subsidiary

The region has displayed strong growth and Kraken has an increasing base of customers and strategic partners there – which only speaks for the establishment of the new subsidiary. In addition to customer support, KRG will focus on the development of 3D imaging sensors, machine learning and a AI algorithms for underwater robotic platforms. "We believe that underwater robotics technology has finally reached its tipping point," said Karl Kenny, Kraken's President & CEO. "Today's underwater robotics industry can be compared to the digital photography industry; over the past 15 years we've gone from 35mm film to now having camera sensors on a chip and images in the cloud. Next generation underwater robotic platforms will also be sensor-centric to reduce costs and simplify their ease of use. The future of underwater robotics will be less about commodity hardware and more about innovative sensors using very smart algorithms and artificial intelligence. That's the fundamental thinking that led us to establish KRG in Bremen," Karl Kenny continues. The unit will be led by Dr. Jakob Schwendner as Managing Director. Jakob has spent 10 years at DFKI, (the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) as an expert in autonomy, systems and software engineering for robotics, mission management, SLAM navigation, embedded systems, sensor processing and sensor fusion. Dr. Jakob Schwendner, Managing Director of Kraken Robotik GmbH, said, "While there has been marked progress in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) development, we want to focus on advancing underwater robotic vehicle autonomy."