Being showcased for the first time at SNA 2025, TSUNAMI is being pitched to meet US and allied needs “for a readily available, versatile fleet of multi-mission uncrewed assets to team effectively across the fleet,” said Textron. The new line – which melds proven Brunswick hulls with Textron’s autonomy system – is the result of a cooperation going back almost three years.
Textron is already supplying its Common Unmanned Surface Vessel (CUSV) – adapted to become the US Navy’s first small USV program of record – to meet the needs of the navy’s mine countermeasures (MCM) community. The cooperation with Brunswick is intended to meet projected demand for a cheaper, less complex platform based on a commercially available hull, according to David Phillips, Textron Systems’ senior vice-president for air, land and sea systems. “That [MCM mission] drives cost, it drives complexity, it drives weight, it drives lead time [into CUSV],” he told a 10 January media briefing.
“And many of the missions that we see as emerging are not requiring, let’s say, the ability to survive a mine blast, or the ability to have to power such a such a power hungry system as a sweep cable. So we see a market emerging where we don’t need something as expensive or as capable.”
To achieve this, Textron Systems has paired its CUSV autonomy suite with Brunswick’s proven range of commercially available watercraft. “We realized [was] that combining Brunswick portfolio of reliable high performance vessels – their watercraft, propulsion systems, control systems and manufacturing capacity and their global footprint – along with our mature autonomy technology and systems integration capability, was really the perfect combination to allow us to develop an accessible, rapidly deployable and a modular, open systems, architecture oriented family of vehicles or systems,” Phillips said.
“Our relationship and collaboration with Brunswick has us go right into their line to be able to access whatever water craft in terms of size…from 14 feet all the way to 42 feet in length.”
Fuelled by gasoline for ease of logistics, maintenance, and affordability, the TSUNAMI vehicle family also provides payload capacity of 1,000 lb/453.6 kg. Textron notes that the 24 ft, 25 ft and 28 ft hulls – the baseline variants for TSUNAMI – are deployable up to Sea State 4 with ranges varying between 600 nautical miles to over 1,000 nautical miles.
TSUNAMI has not been developed to address any specific program of record or market opportunity. Rather, it is a company-funded venture intended to address a number of different mission sets for which CUSV is considered too expensive or engineered. Examples include test and trials work, port security, training, and escort operations.
“TSUNAMI really opens the door to support those kind of missions and those use cases, other than mine warfare, where a customer will be looking at a platform that is, that is readily available, reliable, capable, scalable, and maybe most importantly, inexpensive,” Phillips said. “And the way many of our customers define inexpensive is not in terms of dollars, it’s in term of [being] attritable.”
The key technology enabler for TSUNAMI is a common vehicle control computer – what Phillips called an ‘autonomy wrap’ – which is overlaid onto the standard Brunswick drive-by-wire control system. This autonomy wrap re-uses the mature and certified UMAA-compatible software solution from CUSV.
“So TSUNAMI, combined with our experience in the USV space – control systems development and fielding, autonomy, payload integrations and software development — and all the things we continue to do for our navy customers lends itself to supporting these emerging needs in a different kind of platform,” Phillips told reporters.
Capitalising on Brunswick’s existing watercraft portfolio also enables rapid scaling of manufacture output without the cost and risk of developing a custom production line, said Phillips. “We’re taking the power of existing recreational capacity and utilizing that [to meet] a broader demand signal to achieve a lower cost, higher maturity and confidence in delivery and our autonomy.”
Textron and Brunswick have stepped up their product development activities over the past year, including a series of in-water trials to demonstrate the TSUNAMI solution. “We’ve gone out on the lakes in Wisconsin and demonstrated things like collision avoidance and levels of autonomy to make sure that what we’ve got is a mature system that will meet many of the requirements specific to what we believe our customers will want,” Phillips said. “We’ve funded those demonstrations internally and made sure that before we launched this product, that we’ve done enough of our internal testing both sea states.”
Test activity has included control of multiple vehicles, he added. “I won’t get into how many…but I think the most important point I want to make [is that] we have demonstrated this system controlling multiple watercraft from a single operator system.”
