Commercializing Autonomous Underwater Drones
Evaluating manufacturing, underwater communication, and commercial rollout of low-cost autonomous drones.
0 sourcesVoices in this topic
All paragraphs
Oct 15, 2026
- Will O'Brien Ulysses’ base Mako can sell for as little as $50,000 to navies, versus roughly $5 million for the common U.S. Navy autonomous underwater vehicle; the work it targets is also often supported by ships costing a few hundred thousand dollars a day. Will …
- Cheeky Pint The system pairs a 2,000-nautical-mile autonomous surface craft, Leviathan, with modular Mako underwater vehicles. Leviathan transports, recovers, wirelessly charges, and connects the drones to Starlink; Mako’s modular battery packs, propulsion, stereo …
- Underwater communications are the central technical constraint, forcing intelligence onto the vehicle. Acoustic links deliver only about 10 kilobytes per second over five kilometers, so Mako carries roughly 100 times more compute than other …
- Manufacturing capacity, not customer demand, is now Ulysses’ limiting factor. The company is declining contracts, plans a factory next year that could rank among the world’s largest underwater-drone facilities by unit …
- Seagrass restoration supplied the initial wedge and the reusable technical stack. Seagrass covers 2% of the seafloor yet holds 20% of ocean carbon, and about 20% of commercially important fish stocks rely on it. O’Brien …
- Early commercial traction spans mine countermeasures and offshore-wind maintenance. Ulysses won its first U.S. Navy and offshore-wind contracts in its second year; for floating wind, its robots can inspect power cables …