In oceans around the world, crewed ships are being replaced by unmanned robotic boats that can be deployed on security missions around the clock.
The ocean drones are filled with sensors looking for signs of nefarious activity, from enemy submarines placing devices on offshore infrastructure, to drug smuggling, migrant trafficking and illegal fishing.
Powered mostly by wind and solar energy, they can endure extreme weather and one has previously covered 15,000 miles in 13 months without a break for servicing.
They are manufactured and operated by Saildrone, a California-based company founded by Richard Jenkins, 48, a British engineer.
Saildrone uses the craft, which can be as large as 65ft long and weigh 15 tons, to collect many terabytes of data per day per vehicle and employs software engineers to analyse that data for customers including the US military, coastguard and border patrol.
“Everyone has a different type of target,” Jenkins said. “So we use machine learning and AI to do models that look at all the data, look at trends between the data and then, for example, say, of the 10,000 things we saw today, this is the boat you should go to investigate because it has the highest chance of having drugs on board.”
In April Saildrone announced that it was setting up a European subsidiary in Denmark to address the rising demand for maritime security applications in European waters as nations prepare for the next era of warfare driven by artificial intelligence.
“There’s significant interest from many, if not all, of the Baltic countries, due to the security challenges they face right now,” Jenkins said.
Saildrone has held talks with the Royal Navy, but does not have a contract with the UK government.
The Sunday Times revealed last month that Russian sensors thought to be spying on the UK’s nuclear submarines had been found hidden in the seas around Britain.
Jenkins said Saildrone’s craft could be used to spot such sensors, which are deemed a national security threat as Russia attempts to use underwater warfare to map and potentially sabotage crucial British infrastructure.
The ocean drones use a range of tools, including cameras and radars above and below the surface, to tell Saildrone where things are and detect noises or movements of military assets such as submarines. The company uses a sonar system to penetrate the sea floor and detect sensors that have been placed on the seabed or buried under the seabed. “There’s the concern that Russia is placing devices on cables, which they could trigger later, by different means,” Jenkins said. “So if you have a conflict, you could remotely cut all the cables, simultaneously.”
Jenkins grew up in Lymington, Hampshire, and learnt to sail on the Solent as a child. He was racing dinghies by the age of ten and completed his first Atlantic crossing at 16. By his twenties he was working on boat designs for super-maxi racing yachts.
He studied mechanical engineering at Imperial College London and earned money in the summer holidays by delivering yachts built and serviced in England down to their wealthy owners in the Mediterranean.
While studying at Imperial he decided he wanted to break the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle.
“I thought it was going to be very easy,” he said. “But it was an incredibly difficult challenge.
“I ended up building five different vehicles and testing in five countries prior to getting the record in 2009 — so it took me ten years to get the record and it was a one-man band. I designed them, built them and drove them, spending many, many years hanging out in remote parts of the world and deserts, waiting for wind in order to get the record.”
Jenkins had almost no budget for the project. “I was literally begging, borrowing and stealing to do it.”
He eventually succeeded in 2009, reaching 126.1mph in his Greenbird car on the dry plains of Ivanpah Lake in Nevada. The carbon-fibre composite vehicle was described at the time as a “very high performance sailboat” that used a solid wing, instead of a cloth sail, to generate movement.
The wind system he created for that project became the foundation for Saildrone, which he founded in 2012. “Now we’re an incredibly commercial and valuable business, which came from technology which was born out of a ten-year passion to get a record,” he said.
The company does not disclose the valuation of the business but it has raised $300 million so far in venture capital. This year will be its fourth year of 100 per cent year-on-year sales growth, Jenkins said. Saildrone has about 140 craft in its fleet, of which about 50 to 60 are deployed at any one time.
Five years ago Saildrone’s robotic sailboats were focused on climate work, including tracking marine life and mapping the ocean floor. About 95 per cent of its work is now in defence and security. Last month the company announced the appointment of Vice-Admiral John Mustin, who served in the US Navy for 34 years, as president of Saildrone to help to ensure that its products “meet the demands of high-end naval warfare”.
“The reality with climate work is that there’s no one spending money on it,” Jenkins said. “Got to be honest and say that even though oceans are driving our weather and climate, and they drive things like forecasting in our weather, and hurricanes and cyclones and understanding the ocean is key, but there’s really just no money being spent to do that right now.
“And with the new [US] administration scaling that [funding] back even further, so we’re expecting to see almost 100 per cent of our revenue be generated from defence and homeland security applications.”
Jenkins expects exponential growth in demand for maritime security products over at least the next thirty years. Despite rising tensions with China and Russia the US faces a shortage of naval ships, as it is building fewer than five ships a year, compared with more than 1,700 constructed annually in China.
As European governments come under pressure to increase defence spending, Saildrone’s craft offer an alternative to a crewed ship at a fraction of the cost. Jenkins estimates that his larger drones are about a hundredth of the cost of a ship.
He believes that his boats are also a solution for governments struggling to recruit for the navy and coastguards.
“In the modern world, with the internet and connectivity and social media, no one wants to spend their life at sea anymore,” he said. “The future is going to be autonomous, uncrewed solutions.”
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“A lot of the challenging conflicts are going to be maritime ones,” Jenkins added. “Whether it’s Russia or China or Korea, Iran, the maritime plays a key role, and what we’re seeing now is commercial ships being leveraged for militarised uses.
“You’re seeing tankers doing infrastructure damage, breaking cables, pipelines. Gone are the days when it was only warships that did military things. You’re seeing China aggressively militarising their fishing fleet for territorial, food and security applications.
“You’re seeing Russia aggressively use commercial tankers for sabotage and other nefarious activity. You’re seeing Iran and others use dark fleets for oil and minerals transport, which evades international sanctions.”
In March Saildrone announced a partnership with the US software and data analytics company Palantir to help the company to scale more quickly so it could work on much bigger missions with bigger fleets that can collect more data.
“As you get to a point where you’re going to rapidly scale and make hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles you need infrastructure that can grow with you, both on the manufacturing piece and the operations piece,” Jenkins said.
Palantir’s software engineers have been drafted in to help Saildrone to create robust infrastructure systems to free up Saildrone’s own engineers to leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence and data analysis. Saildrone will also use Palantir’s AI capability and large language models to apply to Saildrone data, Jenkins said.
Does China or Russia have any equivalent technology to Saildrone? “I’m not aware of any equivalent in the world currently,” Jenkins said. “No one comes close to matching the range, endurance, reliability that we’ve demonstrated.
“And the ocean’s a really, really tough place to operate. You can’t buy those lessons. Only through experience can you understand what works and what doesn’t work. We are approaching 2 million miles of voyages, about 50,000 days deployed at sea on the fleet, and even today, every single day, we learn new lessons.”
