Seabed drone detects sub drones, alerts Navy in seconds

An American wireless seabed drone heard uncrewed submarines move through a channel and put their tracks on a Navy operator’s screen within seconds during Exercise Lanternfish 2026, a six-week AUKUS drill spanning Virginia, Washington state, and waters off southwestern Australia. The cable-free Anduril Seabed Sentry node worked with Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear sonar to detect, track, and classify the vehicles without a human relay in the middle.

Key Takeaways

• Anduril’s Seabed Sentry and Ultra Maritime’s Sea Spear put uncrewed submarine tracks on a Navy screen within seconds.
• Exercise Lanternfish 2026 ran six weeks across the United States and Australia under AUKUS Pillar 2.
• The wireless seabed node processes detections onboard, so no cable runs back to shore.
• Royal Navy divers and hydrographic teams operated VideoRay and Teledyne Gavia systems alongside US and Australian crews.
• No public customer contract for Seabed Sentry has been announced yet.

What happened during Exercise Lanternfish?

Vendor announcements dated July 23 said the Seabed Sentry–Sea Spear combination detected, tracked, and classified medium and large-diameter uncrewed underwater vehicles moving through a channel. Tracks fed into Anduril’s Lattice battle-management software, then into the Navy’s own counter-uncrewed-vehicle system. An operator in the Navy’s Unmanned Operations Center saw the picture within seconds, with nobody typing the alert by hand.

The Royal Navy filled in the exercise map a week later. Lanternfish ran for six weeks under AUKUS Pillar 2, the advanced-capabilities strand of the pact, split between Virginia, Washington state, and waters off Australia’s southwest coast. The stated goal was to improve how allies detect, monitor, and respond to threats to critical undersea infrastructure in a live operational setting.

British divers from the Diving and Threat Exploitation Group ran a VideoRay Defender used to locate mines. Hydrographic eXploitation Group specialists based at Devonport launched a Teledyne Gavia autonomous vehicle alongside American and Australian crews. Lieutenant Commander Mark Wilton said the team demonstrated “true integration through the seamless use of Royal Australian Navy equipment” when required.

How does the wireless seabed system work?

Sea Spear, Ultra Maritime’s deployable sonar, does the listening and worked out what the intruders were. Seabed Sentry is the node the array lives on and the network it talks through. Each node is a cylinder about 21 inches across and roughly eight feet long, with computing in the head, a modular payload bay in the tail, and its own anchor. Anduril rates the system above 500 meters deep, though the Lanternfish port-protection scenario was shallow water.

Raw sonar audio cannot cross seawater the way video crosses fiber, so processing happens on the node. Only finished detections, tracks, and classifications hop between nodes on acoustic modems and out to a ship, another node, or shore. Lattice, long used for airborne counter-drone fusion, pushed the undersea picture into the Navy’s existing command setup. Anduril said that plug-in needed no custom engineering on either side.

Why does cutting the seabed cable matter?

Cold War–style hydrophone arrays still rely on a shore cable. That approach works, but it costs a fortune, takes years to lay, and can advertise sensor locations when cable ships work in plain view of satellites. A wireless seabed node is meant to shrink that footprint and speed alerts that reach a Navy screen without a person in the loop.

Anduril unveiled Seabed Sentry in April 2025 and still has not named a public customer for the product. Around the same AUKUS effort, defense ministers approved joint undersea payloads expected in service by 2027, and Britain’s Atlantic Net competition remains without a publicly named winner. For more market and tech briefings, see our Fintech & Crypto Alerts hub. Lanternfish showed a wireless seabed alarm can light a Navy screen fast; it did not settle how many nodes any navy will buy, or where they will sit on the bottom.