ThayerMahan christens unmanned surveillance vessel

ThayerMahan has christened its first "persistent unmanned undersea surveillance vessel", known as "Outpost TM001".

The platform was designed to deliver scalable wide-area maritime surveillance capability to mitigate a rapidly growing undersea threat.

"Outpost augments traditional undersea warfare assets. It can be fielded in a fraction of the construction time, for a fraction of the cost," said ThayerMahan.

Australia's Ocius Technology manufactures Outpost's 22-foot (6.7-metre) hull that is powered by solar, wind, and wave energy. The uncrewed surface vessel carries ThayerMahan's deep-towed passive acoustic array, which provides near real-time actionable maritime intelligence.

"Outpost provides an immediate and rapid increase in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) surveillance capacity," said ThayerMahan.

"This creates a force multiplier for the aircraft, ships and submarines traditionally used for the mission, and it shows how AUKUS Pillar II can leverage emerging technologies to rapidly generate naval capacity."

"Our focus now is to work together to deliver this capability to a number of countries around the world supporting AUKUS, but also other countries,” said Robert Dane, CEO and Executive Director of Ocius Technology.