11-foot robot boats that can conduct surveillance missions to boost US military power

New Zealand’s Seasats reports it has had a very good month in terms of sales for its proprietary Lightfish unmanned surface vessel (USV). According to a press release, they managed to secure $24 million of actual funded orders in August/early September, including boats for the US Navy and Marine Corps. These orders are for its USV and its robot-as-a-service (RaaS) products. These orders, the company reports, appear to “reflect growing demand for small, long-endurance USVs across a broad base of military users.” The star of the show is Lightfish, a roughly 11-foot (3.4-meter) long surface, solar-powered drone boat that stays at sea for extended periods of time. Weighing in at around 360 pounds (163 kg), it is designed primarily for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. In this sense, it can be thought of as something of a mobile, autonomous ocean surveillance post. It can carry different sensors depending on the mission: normal cameras, infrared cameras, sonar, or other surveillance equipment. A good month for Seasats Because it’s solar-powered and designed for very long endurance, you can scatter a bunch of them over a large maritime area and have them keep watch without constantly sending crewed ships or aircraft out there. Reference Raas is also interesting. Under such a contract, customers (like the Navy) will request Seasat to supply the boats, launch them, maintain them, operate the autonomous system, and presumably provide the sensor/data service. Such agreements are attractive to the military because it doesn’t have to establish an entire maintenance, training, and logistics infrastructure around another new platform. Whether a military service buys outright or rents the drones, the ultimate goal is to provide something called “persistent awareness” at sea. What this means in reality is long-term monitoring of things like ports and naval bases, coastlines, shipping lanes, chokepoints, etc without the need for committing manned surface vessels for the task. Such drones can also be used to continuously monitor for things like submarine activity at a location, or act as a watchdog for activities like smuggling. So, rather than deploying a destroyer at hundreds of dollars a day, these solar drones can provide a similar capability at a fraction of the cost. Importantly, larger areas of the ocean can be monitored too using fleets of drones. Watching the seas at a fraction of the cost As for the sales, the key here is that the orders received are “committed funding” rather than defense contracts. The latter tend to be frameworks under which organizations “can” spend up to the total value. So, the $24 million announced represents actual business in the pipeline rather than a theoretical maximum contract value. “This isn’t funding to explore the use of autonomous systems years from now. These are customers putting real dollars behind capability they can deploy today,” said Mike Flanigan, CEO of Seasats. “We’re seeing demand grow across the U.S. government because small, long-endurance USVs solve an increasingly relevant problem: how do we maintain persistent awareness at sea, at scale, and at range,” he added. Get the latest in engineering, tech, space & science - delivered daily to your inbox.Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris’s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.