Bomb disposal robots trail a cable out the back for a good reason. The wire carries power and it carries orders, so the machine crawling toward the suspect package never has to be clever, only steerable.<\/p>\n
Underwater that arrangement gets awkward fast. A sea mine can be sitting a mile from the ship, and a mile of cable is a mile somebody has to pay for, spool, feed out and keep from snagging on the wreck nobody charted.<\/p>\n
Saab’s answer was to build a mine-hunting robot that works the problem in two modes. Send it out on internal batteries with nothing attached and it hunts the bottom on its own, finding and classifying whatever is down there. Run the same hull with a tether on it and it becomes the thing that places the charge.<\/p>\n
The vehicle is called the Double Eagle SAROV, and it has two customers with hardware arriving right now. Poland’s fourth new minehunter has been on sea trials since March and is due to be handed over this fall. The United Kingdom signed for more Saab mine-killing gear on July 2, under what the buyer called an urgent requirement.<\/p>\n
Saab sells three versions of the Double Eagle, and the comparison table on the company’s own product page<\/a> shows how far apart they are.<\/p>\n The MDS is the disposal workhorse: 7 feet 2 inches long, 794 pounds, rated to 1,640 feet, powered entirely through its tether, which buys effectively unlimited endurance and a hard leash. The MuMNS is the newest of the three, 8 feet 10 inches and 915 pounds fully loaded, built around a magazine that holds up to three charges.<\/p>\n The SAROV is the big one. Just under 10 feet long, 4 feet 3 inches wide, 2 feet 7 inches tall, 1,609 pounds in air, top speed 6 knots, rated to 984 feet.<\/p>\n It is the only vehicle in the range Saab lists as battery powered, and the only one it lists as doing mine reconnaissance. The rest of the family disposes. This one looks first.<\/p>\n The name is duller than it sounds. Saab says the “Double” refers to the double hull, because the vehicle’s predecessor only had one.<\/p>\n For disposal work the SAROV flies on either of two cables. One is a thin fiber-optic line that carries video and commands in real time while the vehicle runs on its own battery, which Saab rates for missions beyond 3 kilometers, about 1.86 miles. The other is a combined power and data tether with a standard length of 1,000 meters, roughly 3,280 feet, for jobs where endurance beats reach.<\/p>\n Or the cable stays on deck and the robot goes out alone.<\/p>\n That is not a trivia point. The entire reason navies buy this class of hardware is to keep the crewed ship outside the danger area, and every extra mile the vehicle can work at is a mile the ship does not have to close.<\/p>\n One line on Saab’s spec page gives away how close the machine gets to live ordnance. The rotor magnets in its thrusters are matched to each other to hold the magnetic signature as low as possible, because a mine-hunting robot that trips magnetic influence fuzes is not a mine-hunting robot for very long.<\/p>\n The charge it lays follows the same logic. Saab’s DAMDIC contains no battery or other energy source, can only be detonated once submerged, and can be recovered safely even after it has been placed. Fins and a sighting system let the operator drop it from several meters out instead of nudging the mine with 1,609 pounds of robot.<\/p>\n Saab is making a version of the same bet at much larger scale. The 6.5-metric-ton Autonomous Ocean Drone it is building for Sweden<\/a> drops the tether entirely and claims more than 600 nautical miles of range, on a hull sized to fit through a submarine hatch that will not exist until 2031.<\/p>\n On July 2, OCCAR<\/a>, the European body that manages joint armament programmes, said it had signed a contract with Saab on behalf of the United Kingdom for an Interim Mine Neutralisation Solution under the Franco-British Maritime Mine Counter Measures programme. The organisation said the deal supports “the rapid provision of critical operational capability to meet urgent defence requirements.”<\/p>\n It did not say which vehicle. Most of the release is about how fast the paperwork moved, which tells you something about the mood.<\/p>\n Saab is already the neutralisation half of that programme. Its MuMNS rides on the aft deck of the uncrewed boats the Royal Navy has been taking delivery of, and its whole reason for existing is that an operator can prosecute three separate mines in one sortie instead of recovering the vehicle between each one.<\/p>\n The second of those boats, RNMB Adventure, was handed over at Plymouth<\/a> in early April. Navy Lookout, which follows the programme closely, estimates a single MuMNS at close to \u00a33 million.<\/p>\n The SAROV’s other current customer is Poland, and that is where the delivery dates start to line up.<\/p>\n Saab announced in October 2022<\/a> that Remontowa Shipbuilding had ordered additional SAROV systems for the second batch of three Kormoran II-class minehunters, with deliveries scheduled alongside the ships during 2026 and 2027. Dariusz Jaguszewski, commercial director at Remontowa, said in the release that Saab had “already successfully delivered and commissioned its Double Eagle systems” for the first three hulls in the programme.<\/p>\n Those ships are 192 feet long, 34 feet across, and displace roughly 850 metric tons, about 937 US tons. The hulls are non-magnetic austenitic steel, and they run on Voith-Schneider cycloidal thrusters rather than propellers, which is what lets a minehunter hold station and pivot on the spot inside a field it would rather not touch.<\/p>\n They carry a mixed kit of robots. Alongside the Saab vehicles, the class operates Gavia and Hugin autonomous vehicles and Kraken’s KATFISH towed sonar<\/a>, the Canadian rig that reads the seabed at three-centimeter resolution.<\/p>\n The fourth ship, Jask\u00f3\u0142ka, went to sea for the first time on March 2. Remontowa said the sea acceptance trials<\/a> followed weeks of dockside testing on propulsion, engine room control, communications and the fire and sprinkler systems, and that delivery-acceptance trials come next. Polish defence outlet Portal Obronny reported the same week that handover to the navy is planned for the fall.<\/p>\n Poland ordered the three ships in June 2022, in a contract the navy’s 8th Coastal Defence Flotilla puts at about 2.5 billion z\u0142oty gross, comfortably north of half a billion dollars. All three are now in the water and fitting out.<\/p>\n More than 80,000 naval mines and other explosive items laid during the two world wars are still estimated to be sitting on the Baltic seabed, according to Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defence. In a sea where cables and pipelines have been cut with unpleasant regularity, that is not a historical footnote.<\/p>\n NATO works through the backlog for real every spring. Open Spirit 2026<\/a> ran off Latvia from May 1 to 13 with ships from eight nations, nine diving teams, five autonomous underwater vehicle teams and close to 400 personnel, under Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 1 and led by a Polish command ship.<\/p>\n The Kormoran IIs were built for that work, and for the reverse of it. The class can lay mines as well as clear them.<\/p>\n What Saab has not said is how many SAROVs go aboard each Polish hull, and OCCAR has not said which vehicle Britain bought last month. Neither is unusual in this business, and neither gets easier to find out once the hardware is at sea.<\/p>\n The design choice underneath all of it is the interesting part. The American answer to a sea mine has been to send out something small and cheap that dies with the target<\/a>, and it works. Saab went the other way, built one machine expensive enough to be worth recovering, gave it the option to look and the option to kill, and left the operator to decide which job it is doing that morning. That only pays off if it comes home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bomb disposal robots trail a cable out the back for a good reason. The wire carries power and it carries … <\/p>\nTwo tethers, or none, and that is the whole argument<\/h2>\n
Britain went shopping for a mine killer in a hurry last month<\/h2>\n
Poland’s fourth new minehunter has been at sea since March<\/h2>\n
The Baltic is why anybody is buying this<\/h2>\n