Nauticus gets $2.7 million for development of Aquanaut-derived subsea platform

Houston-based Nauticus Robotics has secured an additional $2.7 million under its current contract with Leidos to advance the development of the Aquanaut-derived subsea platform.

The subsea platform, an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), has advanced artificial intelligence and sensing capabilities and can perform a growing number of jobs without hazarding human divers.

The program has received $14.5 million in funding from Leidos since 2022.

According to Nauticus, the funded extension allows continued development of an Aquanaut-derivative in preparation for customer adoption decisions and government opportunities expected later this year.

Like the commercial UUV platform Aquanaut, the derivative robot features technology to support security activities and is advancing to complete longer and more challenging missions, the U.S. company said.

In addition, this latest award allows further autonomous behavior and operational capability enhancements to toolKITT, Nauticus’ proprietary software package developed to enable an ecosystem of autonomous actions for subsea vehicles and is said to serve as the foundation for this work.

“I am very proud of our team’s performance resulting in this follow-on award, further cementing our partnership with Leidos,” said Nicolaus Radford, Founder and CEO of Nauticus. “This very important work combines great attributes from each company to deploy a truly novel subsea capability.”

To remind, last month, Nauticus Robotics kicked off a commissioning exercise of the first of three second-generation Aquanauts autonomous subsea robots, dubbed the Mark 2 (MK2).