Spying, protecting infrastructures and if necessary eliminate underwater threats. These are the new C-UAS, for which a market of over 11 billion dollars is expected by 2030.
Andril Industries, a manufacturer of Costa Mesa’s weapon systems (California), presented a new family of autonomous underwater vehicles called Copperhead (literally copper head), designed to make intelligent underwater missions, to a fraction of the cost of traditional ones. Two variants, each offer in two different dimensions, with the basic base for rapid response missions including environmental, research and rescue and inspection dialstructure. The vehicle can reach the considerable speed of 30 knots, transport a range of useful loads including active and passive sensors and magnetometers capable of detecting changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. The Copperhead-M variant is instead a ammunition that can be distributed by a larger system, in particular the Dive-Ld and Dive-XL boats of the Andril itself, offering skills similar to those of the torpedoes and is engineered to be produced on a large scale. In fact, a Dive-XL system can carry dozens of smaller copperhead-m and release them quickly in different places in order to also be able to be able to also vast ocean areas without any use of sailors. Founded in 2017 by Luckey Palmer, he draws Stephens (today president), Matt Grimm, Joe Chen and Brian Schimpf (today the CEO), in 2024 he invoiced about a billion dollars using 3,500 people. The aim is to produce and sell to the United States Department of Artificial and Robotic Intelligence, especially in the field of air-free air and underwater systems (UAS) and Anti-Eas (C-EU). The curious name of the company derives from that of the imaginary sword of Aragorn described by the writer Tolkien in the saga “The Lord of the Rings”; Andril’s co-founder, Palmer Luckey, created the Oculus Rift, one of the first virtual reality viewers in the world launched on the consumer market. The idea of creating Andril was born in 2015, when the Defense Department and the Usa Internal Security Department opened offices in Silicon Valley. And two years, after, in 2017, as part of an initiative that began the previous year, the Department of Defense had presented the Algorithmic Warfarecross-Functional Team, known as the Maven project, to exploit the latest research on artificial intelligence in the battlefield technology, starting from a project to improve the recognition of images for drones that operated in the Middle East. From this the idea for a software startup focused on high -tech military applications. Among its productions, that of among the most sophisticated anti-drone systems on the market and autonomous fixed wing systems for the interception of objects called “Slow Movers”, or the multicaterly drones often transformed into threats. Although born during the first presidential mandate of Trump, Andril grew up and was considered fundamental for its technology also by the Biden administration, today also coming to produce planning ammunition such as Altius, an aviolanciable steering wheel bullet also from helicopters and capable of destroying armored vehicles, launchers and objectives in general. Now the military market that demonstrates greater growth potential is instead that of underwater drones, given the need to control and protect the submerged infrastructures, from telecommunications cables to the gas pipelines. According to the majority of western military analysts, this market will exceed 11 billion dollars by 2030.
