Cellula Robotics Partners with the NOC to Advance Marine Autonomy

The U.K. National Oceanography Center’s (NOC) Marine Robotics Innovation Center announced that Cellula Robotics is joining its thriving community of partners.

Cellula Robotics Ltd. is a privately-owned company founded and based in Vancouver, B.C., since 2001. The firm currently has a team of around 30 engineers, technicians and program managers based in its combined office and workshop facilities in Burnaby, on the outskirts of Vancouver. It also has a regional office in Aberdeenshire, U.K., which currently concentrates on business development, customer support and project management.

Cellula is engaged in three main commercial product development programs, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) systems, subsea geotechnical systems and bespoke subsea robotics systems engineering and control system products. Cellula have clients across the globe in offshore defense, oil and gas, ocean exploration and renewables markets.

Cellula Robotics have worked with the NOC previously, supplying a bespoke subsea drilling rig in 2019 for the high profile STEMM-CCS project which successfully demonstrated the potential of innovative new techniques for Carbon Capture and Storage in the marine environment.

The NOC is the U.K.’s hub for the development of marine autonomous and robotic systems, and this new partnership will further enable Cellula Robotics to collaborate and share expertise with the Center’s other strategic partners in the advancement of cutting-edge marine autonomous technology.

Aidan Thorn, Innovation Center manager, said, “It’s great to have Cellula Robotics join the Marine Robotics Innovation Centre. Our interactions in getting to this point have shown that they have a truly collaborative approach to what they do, making them an ideal partner to engage with the community. There are a number of very obvious synergies between Cellula’s work and the NOC’s own work on marine autonomous systems, and this agreement enables us to explore how we can work together going forward.”

Allan Spencer, Managing Director, Cellula Robotics UK Ltd., said, “We are delighted to be joining the Innovation Center. Many of our successfully developed products and systems have been the result of open collaboration with other system developers and suppliers. We ourselves have also often provided complete subsystems, engineering and project management services to other system integrators and builders, so we would consider representation by Cellula Robotics in the NOC community and network mutually advantageous, and we very much look forward to exploring this bilateral relationship further over the coming year.”