PopEye Labs

Autonomy is of paramount importance for the future of commercial vessels. The first autonomous voyage occurred in February of 2022 of which 99% of the journey was autonomous. However, 1% of that journey wasn’t. The manual part? Setting, monitoring and heaving the anchor. Our interdisciplinary team of students at Penn have created a novel technology that can help large commercial vessels automate that final 1%. PopEye is an all-in-one, comprehensive anchor-monitoring solution that solves the problem of anchor loss, malfunction, and danger, and takes a first step toward enabling a fully autonomous anchoring system. We have spent the past six months talking to hundreds of stakeholders, spending thousands of hours iterating our business model, co-developing with the United States Coast Guard, and ultimately building out the physical prototype of PopEye. Now, PopEye automates the anchor-watch deckhand’s task with the world’s first 24/7 anchor-monitoring system for large commercial vessels.