Tthe Skelmir S6 drone weighs only 50-pounds and has a 6-inch diameter

By Kris Osborn, Warrior

Swarms of cylindrical undersea torpedo-drones may soon blanket threat areas with acoustic surveillance, send real-time threat data to human decision makers and overwhelm enemy ships and submarines with explosive firepower, due to the rapid emergence of a multi-functional Autonomous UnderSea Vehicle able to operate as both sensor and kinetic attack weapon. 

Of course the famous Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile can perform both ISR and attack using a “loiter” ability and two-way datalink, yet achieving this kind of dual purpose connectivity beneath the surface presents an entirely new realm of technological challenges.  An industry innovator called VATN sought to anticipate the growing Navy need for autonomous undersea weapons and sensors and built several variants of a new undersea “torpedo-drone.” 

The Pentagon is fast-experimenting with a small, deployable  AI-enabled undersea drone capable of performing forward surveillance and also attacking as a highly lethal lightweight torpedo. The 5ft-long cylindrical drone can launch from a submerged attack submarine or surface drone to track enemy targets, surveil high-risk areas, engage in limited degrees of real-time undersea communication and destroy enemy ships and submarines as directed. 

Made by a start-up innovator called VATN, the Skelmir S6 drone weighs only 50-pounds and has a 6-inch diameter and the companies’ Skelmir S12 is a larger vehicle operating with a 12.75-inch diameter stretching 20-ft long. 

“Both of these vessels can carry a variety of payloads. They carry sensors. They can carry electronic warfare effects. They can act as decoys or they can carry kinetic effects and act as a torpedo. The larger one can be a one-to-one replacement for lightweight torpedoes,” Nelson Mills, founder and CEO of VATN, told Warrior in an interview.

An air-breathing Tomahawk can easily use RF and GPS to enable real-time data exchange, yet a similar connectivity beneath the sea has been an area of challenge and focus for US Navy futurists and weapons developers. The concept is to of course not have to surface and rely upon RF and GPS but rather leverage transport layer technologies able to move data beneath the surface quickly, accurately and in real time. The Navy and its industry partners have continued to make rapid progress with these efforts. 

 “There are a variety of companies developing, really. Solid acoustic communications that allows you to communicate with the vehicle underwater at ranges of 1 to 8 kilometers depending on the conditions. So we've been able to adapt that to effectively change missions, add new parameters and things like that. Bandwidth is very low though, so you're not like sending images back and forth. It's basically texting with the vehicle,” Mills said. 

Surface, Land, Air and Submarine Launched

The drone-torpedo is what Mills referred to as platform “agnostic,” meaning it can launch from a submarine, surface vessel or land location of any kind. 

“We're actually completely platform agnostic. So you could launch it from a submarine, you could launch it from a larger UUV or from an unmanned surface vessel. We actually already did that and fully autonomously launched from a USV. We also have folks that just launched these from the beach, throw them  off the side or even airdrop them. So it really depends on the user and what they need to do. We try to enable most launching modalities,” Mills said. 

Although undersea drones have been in existence for many years now, the cutting edge of these kinds of technologies relates to transport layer undersea connectivity, autonomy, collective or swarm operations and AI-enabled, dual-purpose platforms. The US Navy, for example, is amid what one could describe as a “drone” explosion, given the fast-growing number of unmanned surface and undersea platforms now being developed.  VATN’s Skelmer aligns with this Navy technological emphasis and is engineered to operate autonomously and “collectively” network with other drones and manned platforms. 

“The vehicles have a full autonomy stack. So they have a variety of behaviors and can react in real time to sensor inputs. For example, if they detect a target using sonar or a ping or an acoustic pinger, they can avoid that target if they're just doing obstacle avoidance, or they can home in on that target” Mills explained. “We are already working on real time collaborative autonomy. We've launched directly off of USVs and collaborated with them fully autonomously, and then our vehicles themselves can collaborate with each other  making strategies assigning different roles in real time as targets are detected right? Sending say one vehicle off to track a target while another vehicle goes to fill a gap made by that vehicle going off right?” Mills said. 

Collective autonomy, unmanned-to-unmanned data sharing and the ability to coordinate information exchange across a small fleet of unmanned platforms has been a focus for the Navy for quite some time through efforts such as Ghost Fleet. This often involves computing at the edge wherein forward-operating platforms are positioned to bounce new incoming information off of a vast database, perform analytics and share critical time-sensitive data autonomously across the force without needing human intervention. AI-enabled systems can solve problems and, for instance, identify an enemy target, find weak areas in an enemy perimeter or coordinate intelligence exchange with surface and even air platforms. As part of this equation, Mills explained that the Skelmir drones operate with automatic target recognition, meaning it can instantly bounce incoming sensor data off of a vast database to make target verifications in milliseconds. 

“In real time our vehicles can adapt and the advantage there is that you're really creating a true force multiplier instead of a soldier having to mission plan each individual vehicle in detail, they can mission plan a whole swarm of vehicles, give them certain behaviors and constraints and put them. Out in the water and they can go do their thing.  That's a real force multiplier because our goal is not that. You have one operator, one vehicle, but you have one operator, many, many vehicles,” Mills said.

The advent of technologies of this kind are likely inspiring new tactics and concepts of operation given that they enable host ships to operate at safer stand-off distances yet still operate with closer-in surveillance and attack technology.

 Kris Osborn is President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University