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US defence innovator Anduril Industries has shown off its new torpedo-carrying Copperhead autonomous underwater vehicles and subsea sensing products in a Taiwan invasion-inspired marketing video.
The ‘Command the Sea. Command the World’ video, which features a larger maritime enemy attacking across a sea strait, was published earlier this week on 8 April and encourages the adoption of a network of autonomous subsea weapons such as Seabed Sentry, Dive-XL and Copperhead to first detect an advancing surface fleet and then strike with autonomously launched torpedoes.
“Victory at sea requires the ability to see, sense and strike faster than our adversaries,” Anduril said.
“Despite rapid advances in autonomous vehicles across air, surface and subsea domains, torpedo production remains frozen in Cold War-era designs. To meet the moment, we need an order of magnitude more affordable, highly-producible. That's why we developed Copperhead & Seabed Sentry.”
The cable-less Seabed Sentry deep-sea nodes can sense, process and communicate information in remote underwater environments. The system is powered by Anduril’s Lattice system.
Anduril’s newly announced Copperhead series of high-speed AUVs is designed to act as torpedo launching strike platform.
“The Copperhead series includes two models—Copperhead-100 and Copperhead-500—offering different sizes, payload capacities, and ranges for commercial and defense missions,” the company said.
“Copperhead-M is a munition variant that arms autonomous vehicles with affordable and mass-producible torpedo-like capabilities.
“Designed for rapid-response commercial missions like search and rescue, critical infrastructure inspection, and environmental monitoring, Copperhead-100 and Copperhead-500 can reach speeds greater than 30 knots, and can be equipped with payloads such as active and passive sensors, magnetometers, side-scan sonar, or chemical detection.
“Anduril’s Dive-XL can carry dozens of Copperhead-100Ms or multiple Copperhead-500Ms, delivering underwater firepower on demand to disable or destroy maritime threats. This makes it possible for a fleet of Dive-XLs to control ocean areas with an unprecedented level of autonomous seapower.”
