Anduril has rolled out a new family of modular torpedo-like uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) called Copperhead. This includes kamikaze types designed with a particular eye toward arming larger uncrewed undersea platforms like the company’s Ghost Shark. Today’s announcement follows last week’s unveiling of the rapidly deployable Seabed Sentry submarine surveillance system that could also potentially be configured to launch UUVs, which TWZ was first to report on.
The Copperhead family of UUVs, which Anduril also refers to as autonomous undersea vehicles (AUV), currently consists of the 100 and 500-pound-class types, as well as “M” munition subvariants of each. The Copperhead-100 has an overall length of just under nine feet (approximately 2.7 meters) and is 12.75 inches in diameter, while the Copperhead-500 is just over 13 and a half feet (just over four meters) long and 21 inches wide. Exactly what kind of propulsion system either of the UUVs use is also not currently known, but the company says they can both reach top speeds in excess of 30 knots.
“The [Copperhead-]500 is general capability equivalent to a Mk 48 [torpedo] and the 100 is roughly similar capability, or general capabilities, to a Mk 54,” Dr. Shane Arnott, Senior Vice President for Engineering at Anduril and the company’s maritime lead, told TWZ and other outlets last Friday. “The Copperhead M, we believe, is the world’s first subsea effector, or torpedo, that has been built for autonomous systems delivery.”
The Mk 48 and Mk 54 are the standard heavyweight and lightweight torpedoes in U.S. military service today, and are also in use by various other armed forces globally.
It is worth noting that while the Copperhead-100 and -500 are dimensionally similar to the Mk 54 and Mk 48, respectively, Anduril’s new UUVs are substantially lighter. The Copperheads also have rectangular bodies rather than cylindrical ones, which was a deliberate decision to help simplify production and, by extension, reduce cost.
“It’s easier to stamp out kind of square hull forms than it is the cylindrical [ones],” Anduril’s Arnott said. “Our production system is aimed at being able to produce very high hundreds to 1000s of these systems a year, which is in real contrast to your legacy torpedoes” that are currently produced in much smaller volumes annually.
In terms of a specific price point, Anduril is currently only saying that Copperheads are a fraction of the cost of existing traditional torpedoes. Copperheads can be recovered, refurbished, and reused, according to Anduril, which impacts the overall cost equation, particularly when it comes to the M versions. Mk 48 or Mk 54 torpedoes cannot be retrieved and fired again if they do not hit a target the first time.
Anduril has said that it sees high producibility and relatively low cost a key to making Copperhead a viable armament for what it expects to be similarly big fleets of larger UUVs like the company’s Ghost Shark, which is also known internally as the Dive-XL. Currently, the Royal Australian Navy is the only known customer for the Ghost Shark.
“The Copperhead-M that I talked about can be loaded into our Dive-XL. For 100, we can have dozens of those in a single Dive-XL. And then with the 500, we can have multiple of those,” according to Arnott.
Anduril’s press release on Copperhead today also suggests the Dive-LD, another UUV in the company’s portfolio that is at least being evaluated by the U.S. Navy, as a potential launch platform. The U.S. Navy is pursuing other larger displacement UUVs, particularly Boeing’s Orca, which also reflects growing trends globally.
Copperheads could potentially be launched from other platforms, including aerial ones, according to Anduril.
Anduril has not yet provided granular details about the guidance that will be used on the Copperhead Ms, but has described their targeting capabilities as highly autonomous and tailorable to customer requirements.
“So the systems are set up very similar to our other uncrewed systems where you can give it parameters that are very much controlled by the customer, or by the operator, on what the engagement criteria are. So, within parameters that are set by the operator, the robot can make decisions on which of the targets that it addresses,” according to Arnott. “[This] is typically done within a safety volume that’s approved by the operator before their launch.”
“As the threat evolves, we can upgrade our seeking technology,” Arnott added. “So, as the threats move and change their signature, etc, we can move with it and, at the pace of relevance, with just software upgrades alone.”
As already noted, Copperhead UUVs can be configured as more than just munitions. They “can be equipped with payloads such as active and passive sensors, magnetometers, side-scan sonar, or chemical detection,” according to Anduril’s press release today.
All members of the Copperhead family will benefit from Anduril’s Lattice artificial intelligence-enabled autonomy software package, as well as the company’s going work on subsea communications, data-sharing, and data-processing capabilities.
“The overriding software that sits on top of that is Lattice. That gives the ability for all of those systems to talk to each other,” Arnott explained last week. “So we utilize acoustic technologies, as well as some optical [ones], in order to talk under the waves. We’ve spent a lot of time in our software making sure that we can deal with the extremely low bandwidth that you get [in] subsea.”
Transmission of large volumes of data between underwater platforms is inherently more challenging than ones above the waves, especially higher up in the sky with good line-of-sight between nodes, something TWZ just recently highlighted in reporting on Seabed Sentry. At the same time, data transfer requirements are becoming ever more demanding, even for aerial platforms. Expanded onboard data processing capabilities, aided by developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, are viewed as increasingly critical across domains.
“We have spent a lot of time dealing with both low power, but also the ability to pack a lot in very, very thin bandwidths in order to enable that collaborative capability, which is central to all of our subsea products,” Arnott said. “All of those together provide an incredible power, if you will, for the naval warfighter and littoral warfighter to defend, be able to go down range, and just solve some of these bigger problems in ways that they just cannot do with the crewed systems because it’s too dangerous [and] they don’t have enough of them.”
With all this in mind, Anduril sees Copperheads, as well as larger UUVs armed with Copperhead-Ms, supplementing rather supplanting traditional crewed submarines and torpedoes like the Mk 48 and Mk 54. Copperheads with multiple configurations could work collaboratively with other crewed and uncrewed platforms to provide sea control and perform other missions across a very wide area and at a lower cost than relying on crewed platforms alone. Depending on their maximum endurance, Copperhead-Ms could also have some ability to loiter in a particular area, laying in wait for targets.
For the U.S. Navy, as well as America’s allies and partners, the value of having large fleets of networked UUVs only looks set to grow as potential adversaries, especially China and Russia, continue to push ahead in the same direction.
“The [potential] fight against the PRC [People’s Republic China], in particular, is primarily a water-based fight. These types of technologies and products are built to deal with that,” Arnott highlighted. “Now, on the European front, if you will, the Russians … continue to be a very formidable subsurface power. They are also investing in uncrewed underwater vehicles, plus they’re getting better and quieter and more difficult to find with their crewed submarines, as well.”
In addition to military missions, Anduril is pitching Copperhead as a tool for performing various non-military tasks, including helping with search and rescue, inspection of underwater infrastructure, and environmental monitoring, as well.
“The subsea [domain] is becoming a lot more crowded. The surface is becoming a lot more crowded,” Arnott said. “UUVs are proliferating. USVs [uncrewed surface vessels] are proliferating. The picture, if you will, or the environment above and below the waves is completely changing.”
Anduril’s Copperhead family of UUVs is now the latest addition to that rapidly changing underwater landscape.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com