Four international companies are forming a partnership to provide capability and capacity to tackle underwater threats.
Particularly, the partnership is designed to accelerate deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous technologies in maritime operations, within a wider construct of supporting naval efforts to digitise the oceans to enhance surveillance and information sharing, especially to protect vessels at sea and critical undersea infrastructure (CUI), the companies – Helsing, Blue Ocean Marine Tech Systems, Ocean Infinity, and QinetiQ – said, on 29 April.
Recognising too the increased enduring and emerging underwater threats in the Euro-Atlantic theatre, the partnership aims to develop and deliver sovereign, scalable autonomous mass. The greater enduring threats include higher levels of submarine activity by potential adversaries, underlining enhanced anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capability and capacity requirements. The primary emerging – and growing – underwater threat is the CUI risk, with incidents in the Norwegian and Baltic seas having occurred since 2021. Countering ASW and CUI risks – alongside supporting wider requirements to build multi-domain maritime situational awareness (MSA) – requires improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Given the theatre’s geographic scale, the range of threats across the region, and the increasing requirement for sensing data to counter these threats at scale, integrating AI and autonomous technologies with each other and with other platforms, sensors, and effectors will be crucial to building the required mass.
According to the companies’ statement, Helsing brings to the partnership expertise in AI-powered defence technology; Blue Ocean Marine Tech Systems provides dual-use autonomous systems for data collection (with such systems including oceanic gliders delivering targeted or wide-area surveillance); Ocean Infinity adds innovation and expertise in advanced maritime robotics and remote and autonomous operations and technologies, with its commercial maritime technology background including uncrewed surface vessel (USV) and uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) operations; QinetiQ offers significant experience in data architecture, integration, and assurance, plus technology, system, and process testing against operational needs.
NATO navies are already using AI-based products on operations to enhance capacity to meet ASW, CUI, and MSA requirements. Given these needs, the new partnership offers particular value, Amelia Gould – Helsing Maritime’s General Manager – told Naval News.
Helsing being a defence AI company is critical, said Gould.
“We start from the ground up with AI suitable for solving defence problems …. That covers all the things you would need around assurance, explainability, and data provenance.”
Amelia Gould – Helsing Maritime’s General Manager
“Next is understanding the difference that AI and software-first solutions make,” Gould continued. “This is where the partners come in. [It] is about how you leverage AI.”
“What we’re bringing is understanding the defence concept,” Gould explained. “This includes lessons from the Russo-Ukraine war about how to iterate AI quickly. It’s not just about ‘one-shot’ AI: it’s about AI that continually learns and adapts – which is essential in a defence context – and then bringing in the right partners with the right strengths to put [AI] on the right platforms in the right context, and understanding how it’s integrated and assured into an existing maritime ecosystem with other ships and vessels.”
The partners have already been co-operating to apply their concepts, capabilities, knowledge, and expertise in practice. “Because we had that common purpose and that common idea of what we’d be able to achieve, we started by working together doing real things,” said Gould.
“It’ll be a lot faster than any one company trying to do everything on their own,” Gould added. “This coming together is how we think we can do things differently and deploy capability for navies within a year.”
Leveraging what the different partners bring enables the capability and capacity they are seeking to be developed to meet different use cases within the requirements to support ASW, CUI, MSA, or other tasks like indicators and warning. “We’re very focused on being a mission-led partnership,” said Gould. “The partnership is about diversity of capabilities, but also of thought because … things will come up that none of us have thought of, and it will be about how we work together to solve the problems our navies need us to do.”
The partnership is designed to develop connected and integrated capability – not just new platforms like maritime uncrewed systems (MUS), but the ‘smart’ use of software and new technology that can multiply MUS platforms’ sensing coverage.
Collectively, the partners intend to add capacity in actively combating the threat, through using AI and autonomy to accelerate delivery of capability that can be scaled up to add mass. Moreover, the statement clearly defined the capability delivery milestone to accelerate towards – for advanced AI and maritime autonomy to be deployed operationally within a year.
Key to accelerating along the roadmap is thinking differently about how to scale up autonomy to deliver mass, Gould explained. “We see autonomy slightly differently to just being about an autonomous platform: another lesson we’ve learned from Ukraine is it’s about the whole system you put around the platform. Hardware platforms alone no longer define the capability.”
Highlighting two points, Gould asked “First, how do you make the hardware as simple and as easy to build as possible, so it is quicker [to deliver]? …. You put as much of [the complexity] as you can into the software, because software is infinitely replicable, and can be iterated quickly.” So, Gould explained, how the capability is designed is key to generating mass with it.
“Second, is the ‘smarts’ you put on the platform – the things that make it autonomous and enable it to do the mission on the edge, to do the thinking at the edge,” Gould continued. “That’s the ‘smart’ bit for the mass.”
The ‘mass’ question encompasses another element. The relatively lesser mass potentially provided by crewed platforms – due to extended and expensive production timeframes, limited availability, and more higher-end tasks to tackle – means their time, capabilities, and numbers will be focused on certain operations.
“Crewed platforms must be used in the right place at the right time,” said Gould. “What autonomy offers, particularly with ‘smart’ mass, is the ability to have that freedom of choice and freedom of action of where you deploy things.” The partners intend to deliver this rapidly, with further announcements anticipated in the coming weeks and the intent to deploy capability within the year.
