Mobula, a boat that sees from above the water
Mobula is the boat that follows Ligmax. New hull, rebuilt autonomy stack, and one capability the first vessel never had: a drone that launches off the deck, climbs, and hands the planner a view of the course long before anything is in range of a sensor at the waterline. Built for the 2027 season.
The problem Ligmax left behind
Every sensor on Ligmax sits within a metre or so of the water. That is fine for reacting to a buoy once it is close, and it is the wrong place to be if you want to know what the course looks like. Lidar returns and camera frames from the waterline are a narrow, cluttered, low-angle slice of the world, and no amount of model tuning gives you the thing you actually want, which is the layout of the whole run before you commit to a line through it.
Mobula's answer is to stop trying to solve it at the waterline. The vessel carries a drone, the drone goes up, and the planner gets an overhead view. Everything else on the boat is a second attempt at the systems Ligmax proved out, with the parts that did not survive a season rebuilt rather than patched.
Eyes above the water
- Deck-launched: the drone lives on the vessel and takes off from it, so the aerial view is part of a normal run rather than a separate operation with its own crew.
- Fused, not just watched: aerial video and position stream back into the same planning loop that steers the hull, so what the drone sees changes what the boat does. It is not a camera feed for the operators to enjoy.
- Designed in, not bolted on: the drone and the hull are being developed together, which is the only way the launch geometry, the power budget, and the radio links end up compatible.
The vessel
- Hull and propulsion: a lightweight composite hull built for the 2027 season, with electric propulsion tuned for two things that pull in opposite directions: endurance over a long run, and precision at the near-zero speeds where the interesting manoeuvring happens.
- Autonomy stack: cameras, GNSS, and inertial measurement feeding planning and control onboard, holding a course and reacting to obstacles without waiting on shore.
- Ground station: a shore-side console streaming telemetry, hull video, and the drone feed, so a run can be watched in full and taken over when the mission calls for it.
Where it stands
Hull design, autonomy architecture, and drone integration are the current work, with hull layup and electronics bring-up following through the rest of 2026. In-water trials run in 2027, first for the vessel and drone separately, then together, ahead of the competition season.
Mobula is a Dialga project: a student crew covering naval architecture, power, autonomy, drone systems, and the ground station, the same split the vessel itself runs on.