Autonomous surface vessel developer Saronic on Monday said two of its three models of unmanned marine craft successfully participated in the latest Navy experimentation exercise, including the company’s newest boat, the 14-foot Cutlass, which was integrated with a loitering munition and a third-party command-and-control (C2) platform.
Saronic’s participation in Integrated Battle Problem (IBP) 24.1 included one Cutlass autonomous surface vessel (ASV) and five six-foot Spyglass ASVs, which are all designed with a modular open systems architecture and were tied into the Lattice software platform that served as the C2 system for the exercise. Lattice, developed by Anduril Industries, is an artificial intelligence-based open systems platform the company is evolving to enable large-scale integration of autonomous systems.
For the exercise off the coast of Southern California in March, the Cutlass sea drone was integrated with Anduril’s ALTIUS loitering munition, which offers two to four or more hours of endurance depending on the variant, and in the case of the heaviest model, up to a 33-pound warhead.
Ukrainian forces have used small remotely piloted sea drones packed with explosives to target Russian navy vessels and critical infrastructure. In January, Ukraine said it had armed some of its drones with either rockets or missiles to attack Russian ships.
Saronic said the integration with the fixed-wing ALTIUS allowed provided an understanding of maritime launch conditions, demonstrated the ASV’s usefulness in extending the launch point of the munition, and addressed networking challenges. Anduril separately said it conducted “multiple beyond-line-of-sight launches” of ALTIUS from “partner” unmanned surface vessels.
The successful demonstration was no surprise to Saronic, which has its own “rigorous test program” five to seven days a week in freshwater and saltwater, including at high sea states, providing the “experience and repetitions and sets” to perform in an operational exercise, Rob Lehman, a co-founder and chief commercial officer of the company, told Defense Daily last Friday. The company is based in Austin, Texas.
Saronic on its website says that Cutlass supports a 200-pound payload at a range of 300 nautical miles traveling at a top speed of 20 knots. If the payload is increased, “you take a hit on range and speed,” Lehman said.
Saronic also said that Cutlass demonstrated the ability to extend C2 networks.
In addition to integrating with ALTIUS and Lattice, Saronic said it was able to interoperate with third-party technology in support of a Pentagon effort, Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER). The RDER initiative is led by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and is aimed at assessing and fast-tracking technologies critical to warfighting.
The open systems architecture of Saronic’s vessels enabled the RDER hardware and software integration in hours to support “multi-domain operations,” the company said. The technology was not disclosed but Saronic said the RDER technical team “controlled heterogenous unmanned systems simultaneously using an adaptable and scalable network.”
The ASVs operated autonomously except when safety concerns require remote control during launch and recovery around Navy vessels, Lehman said.
Spyglass, which has participated in exercises previously, operated in high sea states during night and daytime operations. The company said multiple Spyglass drones launched from a Navy platform using redundant radio frequency communications pathways operated collaboratively to detect and monitor a vessel at nighttime without being discovered using passive onboard sensors and edge computing for object detection and identification.
“The effort demonstrated how an attritable small USV can perform critical functions in an operational environment,” Saronic said.