Underwater Acoustics
In seventh grade, Matthew Zimmerman dreamed of playing in the rock band Metallica. He picked up an electric bass, and by high school, he was playing upright bass. In college, he joined the University of Rhode Island’s jazz band and his professor’s house band—experiences with steep learning curves. Zimmerman was on the six-year plan, “adding majors.” He graduated with bachelor’s degrees in French and German, another bachelor’s in ocean engineering, and several key relationships. “There’s lots of connections between engineering students and music,” he says, referring to the mathematics of music. “You don’t notice a great bass player unless they mess up. Obstacle avoidance is like that: Best case, you avoid catastrophe.”
His path to becoming FarSounder’s co-founder and CEO took root during those college years, when he began working with Jim Miller, a professor in the Department of Ocean Engineering. A graduate student had been working with Miller on a three-dimensional forward-looking sonar project. When that student left, Zimmerman took over. The project earned some publicity, and they got a call from an oil company. “I either had to find a job or turn the FLS project into my job,” Zimmerman says while sitting at the conference table in FarSounder’s Warwick, Rhode Island, headquarters. Their technology wasn’t a good fit for slow-turning oil tankers, but the call inspired confidence. “Our motivation was to help mariners avoid hitting whales and rocks.”
Zimmerman and Miller formed FarSounder in 2001 using private funding from family, friends and angel investors. Miller kept his position at the university and joined FarSounder’s board of directors. Given that Zimmerman was 24 and more interested in developing sensor technology than in business operations, the company hired—and then fired—a CEO. Enter Cheryl Zimmerman, Matthew’s mother. She had helped form the company, and her business experience made her an ideal replacement as FarSounder’s CEO. “I didn’t see my mom at work,” Zimmerman says. “I saw Cheryl.”
Unlike sonars that detect fish, FarSounder’s 3D FLS technology was designed to help owners wend past icebergs and coral heads and dodge whales, all while creating their own high-resolution seafloor charts. FarSounder landed its first sale in 2004 and shipped its first product in 2005. “Our first customers were cruise ships and large yachts,” Zimmerman says. The company was also awarded several small-business innovation research grants that enabled years of research and development, and it earned its first (of eight) patents in 2006. “In 2008 and 2009, we transitioned from R&D work to being a commercial company,” Zimmerman says. “We had around 15 employees at our largest.” This includes Matthew Coolidge, director of hardware development, and Evan Lapisky, director of software engineering, who have both worked at FarSounder since 2002. Zimmerman met them in the university’s jazz band. “Music is acoustics,” he says.
The pandemic brought FarSounder’s first major business headwinds, as supply chains became sticky. The company then moved to semiremote operations and reconfigured some designs, which got it through the crux. Things began to settle down, and Matthew Zimmerman took over as CEO in May 2022, a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine. Successive waves of sanctions were imposed, and the company’s second serious business challenge in two years arrived. Oligarchs, after all, adore their superyachts.
Today, the company is still plowing forward. I also spent time with Zimmerman at Wickford Shipyard’s marina. We carried heavy cases down to Cap’n Bert, a 53-foot research vessel owned and operated by the university. Our first stop was the bridge, where we met Capt. Stephen Barber. We were joined by Lapisky and Heath Henley, FarSounder’s senior application engineer (and a guitar player). The FarSounder team unpacked an Argos 500 (see sidebar) and pole-mounted its transceiver onto Cap’n Bert’s bow. Then we headed out toward Narragansett Bay and the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge. I had a great view of a laptop running a split-screen view, with two-thirds of the monitor displaying FarSounder’s 3D FLS imagery, and the other third displaying top-down FLS imagery and automatic identification system data layered atop National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cartography.
Impressively, the Argos 500 also creates and stores a high-resolution local history map of the ground covered. “When you see something that doesn’t correlate with the chart, that’s what you want to pay attention to,” Zimmerman says. The local history map looked exactly like how I imagine the seafloor would appear to a scuba diver. As we approached the Jamestown Bridge, I stared at the screen. The working pilings were visible, as were a set of parallel footings. “That’s the old Jamestown Bridge,” Zimmerman says. This latter span was demolished in 2006, and the Argos 500 painted a detailed view of its remnants in customizable colors. Ahead, a fast ride ripped a white streak through Narragansett Bay’s blue waters. Zimmerman asked Barber to head toward the wake. As we approached, the Argos 500’s range decreased to a few boatlengths. “Air bubbles are really good acoustic reflectors,” Zimmerman says. “They block the acoustic energy from going to the other side.” As we cleared the wake, the system’s normal range resumed.
“We’re a software company that makes really big dongles,” Zimmerman told me later, back at the company’s headquarters. “Software makes it possible, but hardware makes it feasible.” Zimmerman led me to FarSounder’s testing lab and nearby assembly room. “We do all assembly and testing in-house,” he says, adding that FarSounder uses off-the-shelf components whenever possible. Other parts, including the transducers’ piezoelectric ceramics, are manufactured to FarSounder’s specs by third parties—often between larger-volume jobs for other clients. “All components are made in the USA,” he says. “This helps us control quality.” Vendors often warehouse completed components, allowing FarSounder to practice just-in-time manufacturing.
A testing room has a large water tank with a submerged calibrated hydrophone. A hoist lowers FarSounder transceivers into the water, and the hydrophone broadcasts a known frequency sequence to the transducer. Zimmerman points to a monitor that displays the results from 3,600 angles tested simultaneously. “We correct for variance on an individual level,” he says. Listening to Zimmerman talk about acoustics testing is a reminder that, while he’s mastered 3D FLS sensors, music is his native language. Coolidge, who designs FarSounder’s electrical components, says the company has made a lot of upgrades to reduce assembly time since the pandemic-era slowdowns. These changes also added future-proofing, but even still, navigating past the Russia sanctions required different thinking.
Prior to 2022, Russian ownership accounted for roughly 20 percent to 50 percent of the world’s largest superyachts. Once the sanctions hit, “everything stopped,” Zimmerman says. The workaround involved adjusting FarSounder’s sales strategy. One green shoot has been the unmanned surface-vessel market. Another growth trend has been toward yachts with smaller waterlines. Zimmerman hints at a possible smaller system for trawlers; it could be a boon for yacht owners and the scientific community.
In 2023, FarSounder also partnered with Seabed 2030 (see Yachting, May 2024), which aims to map the world’s oceans by 2030. Zimmerman led me to a meeting room where a large screen displayed a FarSounder customer’s recent cruise. “Most of our customers are going places that aren’t well-mapped,” he says, noting that FarSounder sends some clients USB hard drives to capture their systems’ raw data. If issues arise, customers can send the drive to FarSounder, where engineers can troubleshoot and, if necessary, refine the company’s algorithms. These customers can also opt into a fleet-sharing arrangement, where FarSounder sends their anonymous, low-resolution data to Seabed 2030. In exchange, FarSounder gives these customers access to high-resolution files from the greater fleet-sharing community. This means the customers enjoy some of the world’s finest charts. And FarSounder sometimes informally collaborates with NOAA scientists. On a recent whale-sounding trip to the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, FarSounder equipment detected humpback whales exhibiting interesting diving behaviors. These findings, Zimmerman says, surprised the NOAA marine biologists.
Zimmerman’s eyes lit up as he talked about FarSounder sensors helping to advance science and protect whales. Listening to him talk, I understood what he meant about bass players and obstacle avoidance: FarSounder’s frequencies may be inaudible, but they’re providing game-changing returns on several levels.
