JaiaBots are ultra-portable autonomous vehicles that cost about $15,000 and are designed to work in pods rather than as single, expensive platforms. Built for shallow-water environments such as surf zones, estuaries, rivers, and lakes, they currently operate to depths of about 100 meters, with plans to reach 300 meters. By collecting volumetric, time-synchronized data from surface to seafloor, they offer a practical new approach to marine data collection.

Rather than replacing traditional multi-million-dollar AUVs and USVs, JaiaBots complement them. High-end systems remain valuable for deepwater mapping, but Jaia extends capability into shallow, high-energy littoral environments where larger systems are often impractical. Replacing a single $5 million asset with a pod of $15,000 vehicles changes both the economics and the mission profile: teams can deploy more vehicles at once, cover more ground quickly, and reduce the operational risk of losing a single platform.

JaiaBots are already supporting environmental and climate missions with sensors for temperature, depth, currents, bottom type, and wave height, as well as payloads for fluorometry, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity, oil spill detection, harmful algal bloom monitoring, bottom imagery, and eDNA-based pathogen and species detection.