Radical plan to build ‘killer’ robotic submarines in Sydney, Australia

These state-of-art “killer robots” are being touted as the answer to Australia’s great submarine fail.

Australia’s defence is in a precarious place. The replacement submarine project’s catastrophic political and corporate failings will leave our sea lanes vulnerable. But a controversial tech entrepreneur plans to up-end all that with a radical – and risky – new plan.

The company is called Anduril – the name of a magical sword in J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings. Its chief is Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headset developer and fired Facebook executive, Palmer Luckey.

He wants to build Australia the “iPhone” of artificial-intelligence-controlled killer robots.

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A computer-generated image of an Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (XL-AUV) being developed for the Royal Australian Navy. Source: Anduril Australia

Speaking at a recruiting function in Sydney on Thursday, Luckey says apathetic, bureaucratic and misdirected thinking is preventing the defence industry from producing results.

“So many of these projects (are) just being done in bizarre ways that go on forever, and ever and ever and ever, and ever …” he said. “And people make a lot of money working on projects forever. They get paid to do work – not to make things that work.”

Luckey says he is only in a position to bypass such entrenched military-industrial thinking through his personal wealth.

“You can spend your own money and build a defence product company where you decide what to build, how to build it, and then you sell it to a government customer when you have a technology that actually works,” he says.

Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey. Source: Supplied.

Anduril was contracted on a three-year, $140 million deal by the Australian Defence Force’s Next Generation Technologies Fund in March this year.

It must deliver three operational prototype underwater drones capable of carrying sensors and weapons over great distances and dive to depths of up to 6km.

Known as Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs), the submarines will be up to 30 metres long. Testing of the project’s systems will begin early next year.

Luckey says the goal is to build a large force of these killer robots to provide surveillance and defence of Australia’s strategic waterways. And deterrence.

“There’s massive potential for asymmetric disruption, where you could have a small nation make massive advances that make them an outsized power,” he says. “What I expect to see is for a small nation to say, you know what, we’re going to heavily invest in autonomy and autonomous technology, and we’re all of a sudden going to be way, way stronger than all of our all of our nearby rivals.”

Riding shotgun for Collins

The Collins-class submarines’ days are numbered.

Their technology is ageing. And the constant immense changes in pressure and temperature associated with their underwater job are straining their hulls.

Their lives can be extended. But not entirely rejuvenated.

And the cancellation of a contract to build 12 replacement submarines has put any replacement up to two decades behind schedule.

Collins Class submarines HMAS Collins, HMAS Farncomb, HMAS Dechaineux and HMAS Sheean in formation while transiting through Cockburn Sound, Western Australia in 2019.

So networking groups of smaller killer robots to crewed Collins-class “motherships” may be the solution Australia’s navy needs.

Anduril’s Australian Chief Engineer Dr Shane Arnott told the Sydney forum that the XL-AUV will be a school-bus-sized vehicle capable of travelling great distances, loiter on station for long periods – “and pack a whole heap of surprises”.

He says the technology will “kind of flip the script on the denial tactics that they’ve been doing to us – denying our ability as the West to manoeuvre in the Pacific – by planning some surprises in our own backyard”.

But their AI brains won’t be operating entirely by themselves.

“Crewed submarines are required for a vast number of missions that uncrewed systems cannot do,” Dr Arnott says. “But that said, there’s a very big waterfront that the Australian Defence Force needs to cover. Having uncrewed capabilities to complement the crewed capabilities is very useful – particularly when the mission is dull, dirty or dangerous.”

The XL-AUV doesn’t need to carry crew. That means all the associated equipment required to sustain life is unnecessary.

The craft can be flooded. Only sensitive equipment needs pressure and waterproof shielding – not the entire hull. And the basic carrying hull can be designed to accommodate a variety of interchangeable mission modules.

Head Navy Capability Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said the program would focus on delivering the capabilities the Navy desperately needs.

“We will build a little, test a little and learn a lot,” Rear Admiral Quinn told media earlier this year.

Homegrown resilience

Canberra is now 12 months into an 18-month review of its submarine options after cancelling the French deal. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the US is in no position to design and build them for us. And converting smaller British designs to Australia’s needs may end up being as messy as the abandoned French project.

But successive Australian Defence White Papers have emphasised the need to manufacture arms and ammunition on shore to guarantee their supply. International supply chain disruptions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war and Chinese market manipulation have only served to emphasise this need.

The first XL-AUV prototype is not being built in Adelaide, the birthplace of the Collins class submarine. It’s not being assembled in the shipyards of Perth or Brisbane.

Instead, it’s being 3D printed on Sydney Harbor.

A big step forward for Navy’s undersea capability. #AusNavy and @DefenceScience have entered into a contract with Anduril Australia, to design and manufacture Extra Large Autonomous Underwater Vehicles in Australia. #DefenceIndustrypic.twitter.com/S3GJX0P3QM

— Royal Australian Navy (@Australian_Navy) May 7, 2022

Dr Arnott says it’s a sign the Australian Defence Force is putting decades of being a buyer – not a builder – behind it.

“Today, things are pretty cool. We’ve got multiple Loyal Wingman drones zipping around Woomera. We’ve got hypersonic weapons programs. We’ve got rockets out of a couple of companies in Queensland – Gilmore, Black Sky. And now there’s the XLl program. So it’s kind of nice to have played a small role in getting Australia’s mojo back.”

The intention is to set up a production line in Australia – if the quest to produce three viable prototypes within three years works out.

But Anduril’s not just building the XL-AUV for Australia, Luckey adds.

“We’re also building it from the beginning for export to other nations.”

21st Century thinking

“The point of high-end defence technology is not to win a war that’s already started. It’s to deter that war from happening,” Luckey says. “It’s to make the cost of engaging in that war so high that it never happens.”

But he says he adds the experience of Ukraine shows the West has become incapable of delivering such deterrence in a timely way.

“I’m a proud American citizen. We get most things right. But one thing we do not get right is quickly exporting things to countries before conflicts happen,” Luckey says.

Instead, defence contracting incentivises businesses to propose unreasonably complex systems – and spend as much time as possible developing them.

“Guess what my true thoughts are on the Joint Strike Fighter program that’s been going on for decades, at a cost of over a trillion dollars?” he asked the Sydney audience. “By the way, one of the three tenants of the program was “affordable”. It’s actually still on the patch.”

So, he says he turned to science fiction for a solution.

“A lot of sci-fi ideas aren't’ just fun. They make sense. And there’s a lot of sense in making large numbers of mass-manufactured robotics systems across air, land, sea, subsea and space, around applying artificial intelligence to fusing data from all of these different systems into a comprehensive view that can be shared in real-time. That’s why we started the company, not knowing exactly what the products would be.”

It’s all about the software, he adds.

Anduril’s using modern ‘big-tech’ thinking similar to that behind an iPhone, where the product becomes more functional through software updates than hardware upgrades.

“The first core product we built was Lattice, our AI sensor fusion platform that connects all our different hardware,” he explains. “And we’ve integrated more third-party hardware than our own stuff. And every product that we built is built on top of that same software platform.”

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel