Leidos unveils new UUV for US Navy

Virginia-based Leidos has announced a new Uncrewed Undersea Vessel (UUV), Sea Dart. This is a high-performance, low-cost, flexible and adaptable UUV designed to support the US Navy and commercial customers across a broad range of missions, the company says.

“For more than two decades, Leidos has been at the forefront of supporting the U.S. Navy with cutting-edge autonomous subsurface and surface vessels,” said Dave Lewis, senior vice president of Sea Systems for the company. “Sea Dart is the next step in the progressive evolution of our UUV product line, introducing a new, low-cost commercial UUV to the market. It offers the flexibility to fully customize customer payloads while staying true to our core commitment to keeping production costs significantly lower than other models.”

Sea Dart currently comes in two different standard diameters, six and nine inches (15.24 and 22.86mm), and is transportable by one or two people, the company says. It is payload agnostic and compatible with the US Navy’s preferred Underwater Vehicle software architecture as well as the its new non-propagating UUV battery design. Sea Dart’s high performance and low cost make it ideal for difficult missions in contested high-risk, environments and, at the other end of the spectrum, for use in scientific and research settings where low cost is paramount, Leidos adds. A 12 ¾ inch (32.285mm) diameter version is also under consideration.

Depending on payload and configuration, Leidos’ Sea Dart UUV can assist in counter-mine operations, underwater survey, undersea infrastructure configuration monitoring, battlespace preparation, environmental sensing, and other missions that benefit from proliferation of low cost, high capability UUVs, says the company. Its ability to operate at tactically relevant speeds and depths for hours while providing significant amounts of payload power translate to rapid deployment and mission flexibility.  It’s low cost, up to 80-90% less than other small UUVs with similar performance, make Sea Dart an ideal option when performance and budget efficiency matter, Leidos says.

With two variants that Leidos designers and engineers took from design concept to functional test in a year, Leidos’ Sea Dart family of UUVs joins the company’s new small Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV), Sea Archer, and its operationally proven medium USVs, Sea Hunter, Sea Hawk, Ranger and Mariner which make up the US Navy’s Unmanned Surface Vessel Division One (USVDIV-1). Based in San Diego, California, the ships of USVDIV-1 visited Sydney in late-2023 as part of US Pacific Fleet exercise Integrated Battle Problem (IBP) 23.2. They navigated across the Pacific autonomously, escorted only by the Austal USA-built Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) USS Oakland.