Helsing has successfully conducted a series of at-sea trials for its uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV)-based autonomous surveillance package, which encompasses the SG-1 Fathom glider and onboard Lura artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled advanced acoustic software.
The trials work conducted over recent months culminated at the British Underwater Test and Evaluation Centre (BUTEC) range, off Scotland’s west coast. In an 8 September statement, Helsing said the trials were “a major milestone in the development of its AI-powered underwater surveillance capability”, demonstrating Lura’s ability to perform autonomous surveillance operations using multiple gliders, even in noisy maritime environments.
The capability package was first revealed in May 2025. It is produced by a partnership involving Helsing, Blue Ocean Marine Tech Systems, Ocean Infinity, and QinetiQ – a partnership announced the previous month.
For the process that concluded with the at-sea trials, Helsing, Blue Ocean, and QinetiQ conducted a three-month ‘sprint’ period, encompassing acoustic performance simulation, followed by in-water testing at a Scottish loch, and finishing with multi-glider sea trials at BUTEC in late July.
Commercial access to the UK Ministry of Defence-owned, QinetiQ-operated BUTEC facility was executed under a long-term partnering agreement (LTPA), Helsing said in its statement.
The trials demonstrated key developments in the capability package itself, plus the partnering and other processes involved in producing the system, Amelia Gould – Helsing’s General Manager, Maritime – told Naval News in an interview.
As regards the capability package, the key development was operating multiple gliders at sea against representative underwater warfare requirements, Gould explained.
As regards the industry partnership, Gould highlighted several significant developments from the trials.
First, “Being able to do something like this in the time we did it … is pretty amazing,” said Gould. When the partnership was announced, the company stated it would conduct a ‘sprint’ process to have vehicles in the water for integrated trials by the end of Quarter 3, 2025. Driving against a shorter timeframe and taking advantage of better weather, the aim was achieved in three months. The partners will be showing the proven capability at this week’s DSEI UK defence and security exhibition in London.
Second, using BUTEC ensured the capability package was tested against the facility’s stringent trials requirements. “We did it in a real, recognised test facility,” said Gould. Highlighting the LTPA’s impact, Gould added “The QinetiQpartnership is not just providing access to the facility, but to their knowledge of undertaking assessments of these sorts of capabilities. QinetiQ being a trials and assurance partner was key.”
Overall, the collaborative working across the partnership has been crucial in building the confidence the team now has to continue maturing both the partnership and the capability at the pace it has been doing, Gould continued.
Third, the trials enabled Helsing to robustly test the durability of Fathom’s design. “We pushed SG-1 toits design limits quite deliberately,” said Gould. Over the same months, other gliders were being tested in the water off Plymouth. Reflecting the need to continually ‘learn by doing’, design lessons picked up from in-water activities are being fed back quickly to the research and development team and the production line at Helsing’s Plymouth factory, and into plans for how Helsing will further iterate the design for manufacture.
“There’s a big difference between a platform we’re using for testing and rapid iteration, compared to the platform we will put into full-scale production with a customer. The aim is to maintain a continuous improvement cycle,” said Gould.
Alongside standard engineering developments that can be expected when working with new technologies, some areas of focus include what hardware componentry and equipment can be removed if the function can be performed by software instead, and to continue to improve vehicle reliability to support availability.
Illustrating the pace of design lessons being learned for Fathom, Gould pointed to the fact that the glider’s wings are currently produced using 3-D printing, with different designs developed initially through hydrodynamic simulation and needing continual iteration. However, in ‘real world’ operations the wings are affected by in-water environmental factors, so the wings on production models will need to be more robust, and not 3-D printed. “That’s why getting in the water is so important,” said Gould.
In developing the Lura/SG-1 Fathom package, the partners are seeking a more affordable, scalable way of conducting underwater warfare tasks including anti-submarine warfare (ASW), critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) security, and wide-area maritime surveillance, compared to traditional means using crewed platforms and fixed underwater sensors. Yet the package is designed to operate in partnership with crewed platforms, providing a spread of sensing capability to find underwater targets, allowing higher-end crewed platforms to focus on fixing those targets. The package’s key contribution is coupling AI and autonomous mass to help address the challenge, said Gould: “Being able to prove the [use of AI and autonomous mass] – with multiple gliders, and showing the performance you can get – was a key point in showing there’s a different way of solving this.”
A 2m-long, 60 kg containerised UUV, Fathom can be rail-launched from shore or at sea, including autonomously. It carries an acoustic sensor. Lura is based around a large acoustic model, and is trained on historical underwater acoustic data catalogues. The partners’ concept is that Fathom units can be operated by the partnership itself as a contracted service, or by navies directly.
Helsing aims to have gliders available for deployment in 2026.
Naval News Comment
Using the BUTEC range offered benefits for both the partners and the facility itself. For the partners, testing underwater capability on a world-leading range, combining instrumentation and routine maritime background noise, would help provide scientifically valid results in proving the sensing capability. It also provided a ‘real world’ operational experimentation environment in which multiple gliders could be tested for safety. In return, the presence of multiple uncrewed vehicles would enable the range organisers to practice conducting tests and trials with the emerging capability of massed underwater autonomous platforms.
A ‘sprint’ process is a focused development period, with tightly defined and expedited timelines for the testing and full resourcing of all engineering requirements (including dedicated staffing and prioritised workflows).
