Anduril Industries on Wednesday said it has acquired Dive Technologies, a small developer of autonomous underwater vehicle (UAV) technology for defense and commercial applications, in a deal that expands its portfolio of autonomous capabilities and accelerates its strategic growth.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Based near Boston, Dive has 30 employees.
Anduril, which is focused on the defense and homeland security markets, said it will integrate Dive’s DIVE-LD modular and customizable AUV into its Lattice OS backbone, an autonomy software that uses computer vision, machine learning and mesh networking to fuse real-time data into a single, autonomous operating picture that can be scaled as needed. Anduril also said it will scale up Dive.
The 19-foot long, 4-foot diameter pier-launched DIVE-LD (large displacement) AUV is designed for low-cost ownership, long endurance, and multiple sensor and survey configurations including multibeam echosounder, side scan sonar, synthetic aperture sonar, sub-bottom profiler, magnetometer, cameras and more. The AUV has a depth rating of 6,000 meters for deep-sea operations.
Anduril said the DIVE-LD can be used for long-range oceanographic sensing, undersea battlespace awareness, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare, seabed mapping and infrastructure health monitoring.
“The world beneath the ocean is completely different than the one above it,” Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril, said in a statement. “It requires different types of sensors, modalities, and problem solving than the work we are doing in air, land and space. The Dive Technologies team brings unparalleled, deep domain expertise under the sea as well as a shared commitment to transforming the U.S. and allied military capabilities with advanced technology.”
In addition to its Lattice platform Anduril, which is based in California, provides its Sentry autonomous surveillance towers for force protection, border and maritime security applications, and a range of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) used for surveillance, counter-UAS, research and other applications. Anduril was recently awarded a nearly $1 billion contract by U.S. Special Operations Command to be the systems integrator to provide C-UAS solutions to U.S. Special Operations Forces worldwide.
Anduril said that Dive uses a type of three-dimensional printing—Large Format Additive Manufacturing—and a “novel system architecture” to quickly produce the DIVE-LD at lower costs than other AUVs. Anduril said that once it integrates the next iteration of DIVE-LD into Lattice, it “will further disrupt this segment of the market.”
Dive has a mix of commercial and government customers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently awarded the company a grant under the agency’s Embedded Entrepreneurship Initiative to accelerate AUV commercialization. The grants are typically in the $250,000 range and enable the recruitment of talent.
“With Anduril, we will rapidly scale our team, technology, and production to ensure our military partners have the best, most strategic advantage and our commercial customers have the most reliable tech in the greatest depths of the world’s oceans,” Bill Lebo, Dive’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
Dive launched the DIVE-LD commercial AUV in April 2021 in a robot-as-a-service model.