Anduril Industries and Ultra Maritime have announced an exclusive partnership aimed at advancing autonomous undersea surveillance technology for the United States and allied nations.
According to a joint statement released this week, the companies are collaborating to integrate Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear deployable acoustic arrays with Anduril’s autonomous platforms, including the Dive XL and Seabed Sentry systems, as well as Anduril’s Lattice communications framework.
The aim, they say, is to provide “a major advance in distributed, low-cost undersea surveillance.”
The partnership comes amid rising concern about the increasing number and sophistication of adversary submarines. In their statement, the companies noted that while autonomous systems offer a clear route towards low-cost and low-risk anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities, previous efforts have been limited by challenges around range, endurance, sensitivity, communication, and scale.
The proposed solution would see the Dive XL vehicle autonomously delivering and deploying the Seabed Sentry modular payload system, which hosts the Sea Spear lightweight acoustic sensor array. Once deployed, Sea Spear would employ modern artificial intelligence techniques to conduct sonar processing at the tactical edge, according to Ultra Maritime.
The system would then use acoustic communications, integrated into Anduril’s Lattice framework, to relay submarine detection data in real time. The companies stated that the approach allows for multiple systems to be deployed over wide ocean areas, creating a distributed sensing network to track submarine activity more effectively.
End-to-end in-water testing of the integrated system is expected to be completed later in 2025.
Ultra Maritime, headquartered in Braintree, Massachusetts, employs more than 2,300 personnel worldwide and specialises in sonar, radar, expendables, signature management, and naval power systems. The company maintains major facilities across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
very usefull to patrol underneath cables, intel gathering, securing departures of SSBN etc… freeing manned subs for more complex tasks
Presumably they’ve given up on blue-green lasers for communication.