Saab makes play into autonomy software market aimed at unmanned ships

EURONAVAL 2024 — Swedish defense contractor Saab is throwing its hat into the market of maritime autonomy software, debuting its new “Autonomous Ocean Core” designed to offer navies the ability to command and control surface and subsurface platforms from afar — as far as the city of Paris sits from the islands off the coast of Sweden.

“Autonomous Ocean Core can boost key operational strengths for the dull, dirty, dangerous and dear. This control system gives our customers a tactical edge, increasing availability and efficiency and becoming less dependent on active manpower,” said Mats Wicksell, senior vice president and head of Saab’s business area Kockums.

The Swedish company’s pitch, as Saab’s engineers describe it, is that AOC is capable of being integrated into any small or medium vessel — regardless of whether that boat was designed to be an unmanned platform — and turn it into it a remote-controlled craft that can be operated from ship or ashore.

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During the Euronaval exposition here in Paris, company officials showed potential customers, and an international group of reporters, a brief demonstration featuring a CB90 fast assault craft stationed in waters north of Sweden’s coastline, in the ballpark of 1,800 kilometers away.

The craft, guided by the AOC software and being filmed by a small aerial drone, performed a handful of maneuvers including transiting around the complicated terrain and thousands of islands scattered off Sweden’s mainland.

“The autonomy and the core technologies for this is something that fits very well for us when it comes to what we also have been working with over a number of years with lean manning to make sure that the armed forces can do more using less people,” Lars Brännström, a Saab executive overseeing Kockums shipyard, said. “We have this demonstrated in the highly advanced Visby stealth corvettes, our submarines and a number of different products.”

While officials were tight-lipped about specific sales, the Stockholm-based company’s most natural customer, the Swedish Armed Forces, have already conducted trials with Saab’s Enforcer-3, a CB90 craft that was modified with autonomy software to experiment with how it could be used as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance asset. Peter Karlström, the project manager for AOC at Saab, told Breaking Defense that while Enforcer-3’s initial demonstrations with the Swedish military pre-dates AOC, that craft and others in Saab’s inventory have since been updated with various baselines of the newer software.

The trend of interest into unmanned and autonomous vessels has been a theme in recent years for both for the US Navy and its industrial base, as well as European militaries and their respective contractors. Just here in Paris this week, Naval Group, the state-owned French shipbuilder unveiled its first unmanned surface vessel designed, much like Saab’s Enforcer-3, to act as a detachable ISR asset alongside manned warships.