Why Build Inertial Navigation for Underwater Drones?

Will O'Brien is bringing inertial navigation in-house for scale and lead time. The systems are bought off the shelf today. Internal prototypes are meant to replace the current suppliers at a fraction of the price of a very expensive, long-lead-time supplier, on a supply chain that can scale.

About 20 million aerial drones are built every year, and maybe 1,000 to 2,000 underwater drones. The vision calls for millions of underwater drones, so the build sits on electric vehicle supply chains, drone supply chains, and consumer electronics supply chains, where parts are made in the order of millions rather than maritime volumes. One supplier makes 100 to 200 of a needed component per year. The hope is a few hundred vehicles next year, maybe a thousand. A facility opening next year could be one of the largest underwater drone factories in the world by number of units.

The main problem is building. Demand is ahead of supply, so contracts are being turned down. Daily work is how to build a factory and vertically integrate more of the stack. Sonar is still bought off the shelf while an acoustics team is hired to build systems in-house and sell them from next year.