FortifAI First Sea Trial on Royal Navy’s Uncrewed Submarine
We’re pleased to share that we recently completed successful sea trials aboard the Royal Navy’s uncrewed submarine. Commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, the project focused on evaluating advanced sensor technologies designed to improve platform safety and enable extended autonomous missions, potentially covering thousands of nautical miles.
Our autonomy-enabling AI engine, FortifAI, was deployed on the nine-metre eXtra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vessel (XLUUV), with performance monitored remotely from a nearby support vessel. During the mission, FortifAI used the submarine’s inertial navigation system, periscope optics, and an onboard RF receiver to verify the identity and location of nearby ships passively. All processing was carried out in real time on our NVIDIA-based VizEdge device, which simultaneously logged inertial data, visual detections, video footage, and AIS tracks for post-mission analysis and future capability development.
The trial also marked the first operational use of FortifAI’s semi-unsupervised self-training feature. Our "Dataset Pruning" capability acts as a first-pass filter, automatically assessing detection quality before human review. This significantly improved both the speed and accuracy of data preparation, particularly in identifying distant or subtle objects that human operators might have missed.
In addition to enhancing real-time situational awareness, FortifAI compiled a list of last-known positions of so-called "dark vessels", identified using satellite imagery captured shortly before the voyage. The bearing and distance of these vessels, along with estimated ship lengths derived from overhead views, were stored locally and displayed as augmented reality markers on the live video feed.
We look forward to building on this work in semi-unsupervised learning and maritime computer vision. In 2022, we will collaborate with a leading manufacturer of unmanned surface vehicles to further develop these technologies.
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