Anduril Industries is negotiating a $100 million agreement with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to design, develop and manufacture the Very Large Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (XL-AUV) for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) within three years .
According to Anduril, the XL-AUV will be an affordable, autonomous, durable, and versatile platform that can be configured for a wide range of surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting missions. The company did not reveal more details about the proposed design.
Anduril will deliver three XL-AUVs to RAN by the end of the project and says it will design, develop and manufacture the XL-AUVs in Australia. To support this work, the company is planning to recruit local technology talent and is actively working with other Australian SMEs and the research and technology community to source nearly all elements of the supply chain for the program.
“The XL-AUV will leverage the latest developments in autonomy, edge computing, sensor fusion, propulsion and robotics to bring advanced capabilities to Royal [RAN],” said Anduril founder Palmer Luckey.
Anduril announced earlier in February that it had acquired Boston-based AUV developer Dive Technologies. The latter has developed a modular DIVE-LD AUV that can be optimized for a variety of defense and commercial operations, such as long-range ocean sensing, undersea battlefield spatial awareness, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, undersea mapping and infrastructure health monitoring.
Dive Technologies has also developed a proprietary system architecture and leveraged Large Format Additive Manufacturing (LFAM) technology to reduce AUV manufacturing time and cost, and it is understood that Anduril will leverage these advantages for XL-AUV development.
The ADF has become an enthusiastic adopter of unmanned technology and has improved the understanding of the concept of unmanned operations in recent years. For example, it released in-depth studies such as “Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Concepts” in November 2020, while RAN released “Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2040” in October 2020.
by Jr Ng
