Manu Ignatius, now 34, was working at National University of Singapore’s Acoustic Research Laboratory (ARL) as a research engineer while he was doing his Masters in Electrical Engineering in 2009-2010.

Three years later, he joined Subnero, a company co-founded by one of his professors, as a pioneer team member. It was at ARL where Subnero’s bread and butter was born – the secret to underwater communication and robotics.

Offering cutting edge technologies, Subnero is believed to be the first of its kind in Asia.

“Every day, I’m doing things that have not been done before. I am creating new solutions, making an impact,” explained Manu, general manager of Subnero, on why he has ventured into such a niche field.

Initial Challenges

According to him, they attended academic conferences regularly as part of Subnero’s market research to find out what were the gaps they could fill. Underwater communication is one of the identified challenges that Subnero looked to overcome.

It was not an easy process. As the electromagnetic waves that are usually used by Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G do not work well underwater, a technology had to be developed to enable communications via sound waves. It also had to work around slow transmission times and high noise in the water environment.

Subnero has now developed nodes that can be dropped into the water to allow autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) to estimate their location, navigate and communicate over long distances with other vehicles, installations or nodes.

The technology has attracted lots of support from MINDEF and oil and gas companies.

Rise of Robotics

Subnero’s other core business is in the assessment of water quality through robotics.

Subnero Water Assessment Network (SWAN) is able to gather findings on various underwater elements such as the soil, currents, temperature, acidity, salinity, oxygen levels and algae growth.

SWAN’s demand largely comes from water utility companies and reservoir management boards.

“Traditionally, water samples have to be collected manually and sent to the lab. You cannot have more than 100 readings a day. It is also a nightmare to manage hundreds of sensors and cables.

“But now, the robot can collect data every five to ten seconds and send it to Cloud, where you can monitor wirelessly in the comfort of your office. When you need the robot, you can simply get it to ‘swim’ back to ‘home location’ instead of diving in. In totality, it saves up to 10 times in cost,” said Manu.

He encouraged aspiring professionals to join underwater robotic competitions organised by the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society (Singapore Chapter), for which he is the vice chairman. Two past finalists of the association’s yearly ‘Singapore AUV Challenge’ were previously hired by Subnero.