Monitoring large areas beneath the sea is difficult, expensive and potentially dangerous. Crewed submarines and surface vessels can perform surveillance and mine-clearing missions, but they require trained personnel and significant support. GPS signals also do not penetrate underwater, creating additional navigation challenges for systems expected to operate autonomously for long periods.
Taiwan is expanding its work on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) through a partnership between the government-funded National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) and U.S. defense technology company Vatn Systems.
The agreement covers more than acquiring underwater drones. The two sides will explore AI-enabled command and control, autonomous underwater platforms, local supply chains and maintenance infrastructure, with the aim of combining Vatn’s autonomy technology with Taiwanese research and manufacturing capabilities.
According to Interesting Engineering, one platform expected to be evaluated is Vatn’s Skelmir S12. The relatively low-cost AUV uses a modular architecture, allowing its range, sensors and precision capabilities to be adapted for different missions. That flexibility could allow one basic platform to perform tasks ranging from seabed mapping and infrastructure inspection to surveillance and mine countermeasures.
Autonomy is particularly important underwater because maintaining continuous communications with a vehicle is considerably harder than with an aerial drone. An AUV must be capable of navigating and carrying out portions of its mission independently rather than relying on an operator to remotely control every movement.
The company is also developing SIGURD, an autonomous mine-countermeasure system, as well as a lower-cost inertial navigation technology for underwater and surface platforms operating where GPS is unavailable.
The partnership forms part of a wider effort to expand Taiwan’s unmanned underwater capabilities. The institute is separately acquiring Dive-LD autonomous underwater vehicles from Anduril Industries. Dive-LD can reportedly operate at depths reaching 6,000 meters and remain underwater for approximately 10 days at low speed.
Experience with these systems is expected to contribute to expertise in autonomous navigation, sensor integration, modular payloads and lower-cost production. In parallel, Taiwan is pursuing domestic development through the Huilong program, which has produced a roughly 30-meter-long, 100-ton prototype for testing underwater technologies.
For defense, AUVs can provide additional surveillance around strategic waters without placing crews directly at risk. They can search for mines, monitor maritime activity, map the seabed and potentially inspect critical infrastructure such as undersea communications cables. The same capabilities also have civilian applications in offshore energy and infrastructure maintenance.
The broader strategy is therefore not simply about adding more underwater drones. Developing local maintenance, command-and-control systems and manufacturing expertise could make autonomous platforms easier to operate at scale.
As maritime surveillance becomes increasingly dependent on unmanned systems, modular AUVs offer a way to distribute sensing and inspection tasks across numerous relatively affordable platforms, extending awareness beneath the surface without relying exclusively on large crewed vessels.
