Can this Mass. startup help save lives at sea?

You don’t have to flip the calendar back too far to find an instance of someone falling off a ship.

In late April, off the coast of Cape Cod, a crew member working on the Norwegian Breakaway fell overboard as the cruise liner was returning to Boston from Bermuda. After a 12-hour search involving helicopters, boats and a search plane, the Coast Guard was unable to locate the 26-year-old cook.

A Cambridge startup company is working on a torpedo-shaped device that could help when similar situations arise in the future. Gander Robotics raised $1.1 million last month from investors, began hiring its first employees and set up shop at The Engine, a startup incubator affiliated with MIT.

All that while the company’s two co-founders were finishing up their degrees. Lael Ayala expects to receive her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Harvard this month, and Michael Autery an MBA degree from MIT’s business school.

Autery, who served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, said that according to his research, the survival rate for sailors who fall overboard is about 28%, and in the cruise industry it’s even lower: 17%. And one or two people fall off a cruise ship every month, he said.

The response today is pretty rudimentary, Autery said. “You throw over anything that floats, and you hope they swim to it. The biggest thing is that everything today counts on human reaction time and eyesight.” Even in a helicopter, he said, “you’ve got four people with eyeballs, and you’re looking for the equivalent of a coconut floating in the ocean.”

Michael Autery and Lael Ayala pose next to the Charles River with an underwater vehicle they built as part of an MIT course. Courtesy Michael Autery

Gander is designing an “autonomous rescue swimmer” that can use a new kind of side-scanning sonar to find a person in the water. It then deploys three things: a flotation device for them to grab, a beacon that transmits location via radiofrequency, and a flare to send a visual signal to searchers. (The device, known as an autonomous underwater vessel, or AUV, cannot grab onto an unconscious person in the water.) The device is small enough that it can be easily dropped from a helicopter or tossed over the side of a ship.

Two key factors will be how long the AUV can operate in the water — Autery said the goal is several hours — and what it will cost.

Toby Stapleton, co-founder of the Blue Venture Forum, a group of investors that puts money into maritime startups, said the least expensive AUVs available today, typically sold to the military, are priced at $80,000 and up.

Autery said that he expected to be able to make a device that costs in the neighborhood of $50,000.

Gander, Stapleton said, is “trying to replace some very low-tech systems, like the old circular flotation device with the ship’s name on it that you throw overboard and hope somebody catches it.”

Stapleton also wondered whether having one Gander AUV on board a large ship would be sufficient. But he said that most other makers of AUVs have been focused on tasks such as detecting mines, submarines, and ships, and finding things on the bottom of the ocean — not helping with search-and-rescue missions.

“I think every single ship in the world could use this,” Autery said, mentioning yachts, container ships and fishing vessels. He hopes to have the company’s first prototype in the water for testing this summer.

In addition to Gander, Massachusetts is home to a cluster of more established makers of AUVs, including Anduril Maritime, Saab, L3 Harris OceanServer, General Dynamics Mission Systems, Teledyne Marine, and HII Unmanned Systems.

Autery said he’s not sure the venture would’ve taken off so quickly anywhere else; he first pitched the idea as part of an MIT entrepreneurship competition last December. Not long after, he raised $1.1 million from Underscore VC, Impellent Ventures and several individual investors.

“If I had the same idea in a different place at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve played out the same way,” he said. “Cambridge is this very rich ecosystem for entrepreneurship.”