Defense contractor Anduril has rolled out a new, readily deployable undersea surveillance system called Seabed Sentry, which uses networks of small and relatively low-cost modular sensor nodes. A novel sonar array with a design influenced by the extendable arms on satellites is the main sensor being paired with it now, TWZ reports.
Expanding fleets of quieter and otherwise more modern submarines, especially in Russia and China, as well as growing threats to critical undersea infrastructure, are driving demand for more and better ways to monitor what happens beneath the waves across the Western world.
Anduril has already been working on various elements of Seabed Sentry for around a year. The system leverages various prior developments, including Lattice, the company’s proprietary artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package. The Seabed Sentry name is a callback to Anduril’s first product, the land-based Sentry, which is designed to monitor for threats in the air and on the surface.
A separate firm, Ultra Maritime, is also providing its Sea Spear sonar for use on Seabed Sentry through an exclusive partnership with Anduril.
“Surface and air vehicles can operate with clear lines of sight and reliable connectivity, but the ocean is vast and opaque, leaving current autonomous subsea sensing and communications technology operating slowly in silos. We need a network for real-time data exchange to reliably transmit information into action,” per a press release from Anduril. “Seabed Sentry fills connectivity and perception gaps, enabling maritime awareness and kill chains in ways not currently possible without high expense. With superior endurance lasting months to years, a depth rating exceeding 500 meters, a payload capacity of over 0.5 m³, and a modular, reusable design, Seabed Sentry is built to surpass existing seabed surveillance solutions. It offers operators greater flexibility and capability in even the most challenging underwater environments.”
“Unlike fixed seafloor surveillance systems – which are expensive to place and maintain – Seabed Sentry is a network of ‘cable-less’ deep-sea nodes that sense, process, and communicate critical subsea information at the edge in real time,” the release adds. “It has an open systems architecture for rapid integration of first or third-party sensors and payloads customized to the commercial or defense missions including seabed survey, marine pattern of life building, port security, critical infrastructure protection, anti-submarine warfare, and anti-surface warfare.”
At the core of the Seabed Sentry system is an array of cylindrical buoy-like nodes that are 21 inches in diameter and roughly eight feet (two and a half meters) long. Each one has a modular payload bay and an anchor to keep it in place underwater after deployment.
“The head of it is kind of where all the comms and compute [communications and computing capabilities] live,” Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead, told TWZ. “And then the tail of it, which you’ll see, is where we can host flexible payloads.”
In addition to being physically modular, Seabed Sentry is also an open-architecture system, which helps make it easier to upgrade existing capabilities and integrate hardware and software. How long a Seabed Sentry node can remain deployed will depend on its exact configuration, but Anduril says the nodes should be able to remain in place for multiple months at a time. After that, they can be recovered and reused.
“When it’s done, we can talk to it, and it says, ‘Yep, I’m ready to be recovered,’” Anduril’s Arnott explained. The anchor “will sever itself, and the system is positively buoyant, so it comes to the surface.”
“We recover it, and then we can refit it, and then send it back on mission again,” he continued. “The team can either just scrape the barnacles off it, recharge it, and throw it back in, or … there could be a new mission, new payload that needs to be fitted to it – recharge it, new payload, and off you go again.”
As already noted, Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear is the premier sensor payload for Seabed Sentry at this point, though it is expected to be just one one of many options in the future.
Sea Spear is similar in form and function to cable-like sonar arrays towed behind surface ships, but it uses a unique extendable trusswork to allow it to extend from and retract back into the Seabed Sentry node. The exact configuration of the sonar for use with Anduril’s underwater surveillance system is still being finalized, but it is expected to be tens of meters long when fully extended.
“We design and build towed arrays today for multiple reasons. … For torpedo defense, for low-frequency surveillance, for different things. So it derives from that,” Ultra Maritime’s President & CEO Carlo Zaffanella also told TWZ. “But the trusswork and the creativity behind that, actually, it takes a hint from from some work that NASA did for space, where you needed [a] very lightweight, extendable arm that could suspend in space. When we make something neutrally buoyant in the water, [there are a] very similar sort of physics involved.”
