Royal Australian Navy to get new stealthy underwater drone

Royal Australian Navy to get new stealthy underwater drone

The Australian Department of Defense has announced that the Royal Australian Navy will test a stealthy underwater drone developed by the Anduril Australia.

The stealthy extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle program (XL-AUV) was named ‘Ghost Shark’ by Defence in a ceremony on Sydney Harbour on Monday.

The ceremony included the arrival of a 2.8-tonne ‘Dive-LD’ autonomous underwater vehicle at Anduril Australia’s Sydney Harbour base, which will be leveraged for rapid testing and development. The Dive-LD has arrived ahead of schedule in a major step forward in the $140M partnership between Royal Australian Navy, Defense Science and Technology Group (DSTG) and Anduril Australia to design, develop and manufacture three Ghost Shark XL-AUVs in Australia.

The Ghost Shark program will deliver affordable, autonomous, long-endurance and multimission-capable submarines.

They will be modular, customisable, and optimised with a variety of payloads for a wide range of missions. The 5.8m long Dive-LD will be used by Anduril Australia’s engineers as a testbed vehicle to enable experimentation, testing and validation as it develops the XL version, which will be the size of a school bus.

The ambitious three-year Ghost Shark development program will involve capability assessment and prototyping in record time.

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