Every bomb disposal movie has the same scene. One person in a heavy suit walks up to the device while everyone else stands somewhere much safer. Now picture the underwater version, because it’s worse in pretty much every way: the technician is a diver, the device is a sea mine built to crack a ship’s hull open, and the heavy suit doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n
So what does a robot bring to this job that a trained diver doesn’t?<\/p>\n
Mostly the fact that it’s replaceable, and the diver isn’t. The Royal Navy’s bomb disposal people put that plainly back in June: if remote means exist for this work, you use them. And this July, in Weymouth Bay off England’s south coast, explosive ordnance disposal teams from the US, the UK, Japan, Ukraine and other NATO partners spent two weeks putting it into practice with a 38-pound underwater drone called the Defender.<\/p>\n
The exercise was Sea Breeze 26-2, which ran July 13 to 24, and the US Navy’s account of it<\/a>, posted July 21, names the VideoRay Defender-Viper as the mine disposal system the teams trained on. Sailors from Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 8 ran that training for divers from the Royal Navy, Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Ukrainian Navy. “We are just adding tools to the toolbox,” said US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician 2nd Class Ezra Cimino in that report. Unglamorous, but I think it’s exactly the right way to talk about this machine.<\/p>\n Because staying put underwater is harder than moving. The water in a bay is never still, and inspecting a mine means keeping a camera and a tool aimed at one exact spot while the current tries to shove you off it. Divers manage it with fins and experience. The Defender does it with seven thrusters: four mounted at angles so the vehicle can slide in any direction without turning its body, and three vertical ones that hold its depth and tilt its nose up or down. Onboard software helps it keep station, and the Royal Navy says it can be flown by hand or sent to preset coordinates on its own. Either way, there’s a person on the other end of the cable making the calls.<\/p>\n Here’s the base vehicle by the numbers, straight from the manufacturer’s spec sheet<\/a>:<\/p>\n A couple of caveats here. Those figures describe the bare vehicle, about 28 inches long, rated at 3.8 knots forward (roughly 4.4 mph) and carrying two LED light arrays of up to 38 watts each. They don’t describe the fully rigged British setup with all its attachments bolted on. And the Navy hasn’t said how deep the Weymouth Bay runs went, so I wouldn’t read that 984-foot rating as a number from the exercise. It’s what the platform is built for.<\/p>\n There’s also a cable, and the cable matters. Radio doesn’t get far in seawater, so an untethered mine drone has to steer some other way; the helicopter-dropped one we covered this week<\/a> gets flown through a fiber-optic thread. The Defender’s tether runs the problem in reverse. It streams live video and sonar up to the operator, who can sit in a small boat or a shipping container with a rugged laptop and fly the mission for as long as the job takes, because power and comms both come down the tether.<\/p>\n The Defender is only the swimming part. The British package adds the Viper, a disposal tool riding on the front, and the Tornado, a firing system mounted at the rear. The Royal Navy walked through the sequence<\/a> on June 1, when it loaded two complete systems aboard the support ship RFA Lyme Bay: the drone lines itself up on the mine, the Viper fires a demolition charge into it hard enough to stick, and the Defender backs off, paying out the firing line as it goes. The Navy’s own description says it works “rather like a barb from a bee.”<\/p>\n In this version, the bee gets to keep its stinger and fly home, which isn’t how that deal usually ends for bees. The mine makes out much worse. The vehicle comes back aboard and gets rigged for its next run, the Tornado sets off the charge from a safe distance, and the only hardware the mission actually spends is the charge stuck to the mine.<\/p>\n That June loading wasn’t a drill, either. RFA Lyme Bay sailed for the Middle East as a mine warfare mothership ahead of a potential multinational clearance effort in the Strait of Hormuz, and the Royal Navy says the system has already been used in combat by Ukrainian forces. The Navy hasn’t published anything about what those two embarked systems have done since, so I can’t tell you whether either of them has met a real mine out there.<\/p>\n Here’s what I find pretty clever about all this, frankly: everything comes home except the charge. A lot of the mine disposal hardware arriving in navies right now is one-way, like the 110-pound drone that tilts a shaped charge onto the mine and goes up with it<\/a>. One-shot machines make sense once a mine’s been found and identified. The Defender covers the messier step before that, after the sonar drones that sweep the seabed<\/a> flag a contact and someone’s got to park next to it, look it over properly and decide what it actually is. You don’t want to spend a whole drone learning that the scary object on the sonar screen is a shopping cart.<\/p>\n The Royal Navy seems to be leaning the same way, from the looks of things. Four days after Sea Breeze ended, its Diving and Threat Exploitation Group showed the Defender to American and Australian teams during Exercise Lanternfish<\/a>, an AUKUS event built around protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Swap the sensor fit and the vehicle takes on a different job, which is arguably the strongest card a 38-pound machine has to play.<\/p>\n And if you’re wondering where all this hardware comes from, it’s Pennsylvania. VideoRay builds the Defender in Pottstown, northwest of Philadelphia, and the US Navy fields its own version of the platform, the MK20, for expeditionary bomb disposal teams. The allies passing a yellow robot around an English bay in July were, essentially, training on American gear.<\/p>\n Both navies put their accounts out within a week of each other: the US Navy posted its Sea Breeze story on July 21, and the Royal Navy published its Lanternfish write-up on July 28. Both name the 38-pound Defender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every bomb disposal movie has the same scene. One person in a heavy suit walks up to the device while … <\/p>\nSo why does one small robot need seven thrusters?<\/h2>\n
A nail gun for sea mines<\/h2>\n
You get the drone back<\/h2>\n