Speaker: Leverett Bezanson, Engineering Manager of SeeByte, Inc

Topic: Underwater Robots Waving their Arms and Standing on their Heads.

Bio: Leverett Bezanson is the engineering manager of SeeByte, Inc. leading all U.S. based engineering efforts. SeeByte provides its clients in the Military and Oil and Gas sectors with the most advanced software to enhance the capabilities of their underwater sensors, vehicles and systems. SeeByte is at the leading edge of software solutions and data management for the subsea industry. From autonomous riser and pipeline inspections using AUVs and ROVs, to state-of-the-art Automatic Target Recognition for side-scan sonar in Mine Countermeasures.

Leverett has worked in the subsea robotics industry since 2006 starting at Progeny Systems. There Leverett developed concept to prototype autonomous vehicles driven by thrusters, buoyancy, and hydrodynamics. Leverett also worked at Teledyne SeaBotix designing semi-autonomous launch and recovery systems at first and later running the engineering department.

Leverett graduated from the San Diego State University with a BSEE and later earned a Master of Science Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Signal and Image Processing from the University of California San Diego. The research for his thesis titled The Subarray MVDR Beamformer: A Space-Time Processor Applied to Active Sonar was conducted at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation in La Spezia Italy. This research was on a research fellowship focusing on using AUVs for Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW).

In his spare time Leverett is one of the lead engineers for Oceanzus, a Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE team semifinalist. They are designing an AUV system of systems for deep water surveys.