Denmark tests unmanned robotic sailboat fleet with tensions high in the region

KOGE MARINA, Denmark -- From a region they look astir similar mean sailboats, their sails emblazoned with the red-and-white emblem of Denmark.

But these 10-meter-long (30-foot-long) vessels transportation nary unit and are designed for surveillance.

Four uncrewed robotic sailboats, known arsenic “Voyagers,” person been enactment into work by Denmark's equipped forces for a three-month operational trial.

Built by Alameda, California-based institution Saildrone, the vessels volition patrol Danish and NATO waters successful the Baltic and North Seas, wherever maritime tensions and suspected sabotage person escalated sharply since Russia’s full-scale penetration of Ukraine connected Feb. 24, 2022.

Two of the Voyagers launched Monday from Koge Marina, astir 40 kilometers (25 miles) southbound of Copenhagen. Powered by upwind and star energy, these oversea drones tin run autonomously for months astatine sea. Saildrone says the vessels transportation precocious sensor suites — radar, infrared and optical cameras, sonar and acoustic monitoring.

Their motorboat comes aft 2 others already joined a NATO patrol connected June 6.

Saildrone laminitis and CEO Richard Jenkins compared the vessels to a “truck” that carries sensors and uses instrumentality learning and artificial quality to springiness a “full representation of what's supra and beneath the surface" to astir 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) successful the unfastened ocean.

He said that maritime threats similar harm to undersea cables, amerciable sportfishing and the smuggling of people, weapons and drugs are going undetected simply due to the fact that “no one’s observing it.”

Saildrone, helium said, is "going to places ... wherever we antecedently didn’t person eyes and ears.”

The Danish Defense Ministry says the proceedings is aimed astatine boosting surveillance capableness successful under-monitored waters, particularly astir captious undersea infrastructure specified arsenic fiber-optic cables and powerfulness lines.

“The information concern successful the Baltic is tense,” said Lt. Gen. Kim Jørgensen, the manager of Danish National Armaments astatine the ministry. “They’re going to cruise Danish waters, and past aboriginal they’re going to articulation up with the 2 that are connected (the) NATO exercise. And past they’ll determination from country to country wrong the Danish waters."

The proceedings comes arsenic NATO confronts a question of damage to maritime infrastructure — including the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions and the rupture of astatine slightest 11 undersea cables since precocious 2023. The astir caller incident, successful January, severed a fiber-optic nexus betwixt Latvia and Sweden’s Gotland island.

The proceedings besides unfolds against a backdrop of trans-Atlantic friction — with U.S. President Donald Trump's administration threatening to prehend Greenland, a semiautonomous territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO ally. Trump has said he wouldn't regularisation retired subject force to instrumentality Greenland.

Jenkins, the laminitis of Saildrone, noted that his institution had already planned to unfastened its cognition successful Denmark earlier Trump was reelected. He didn't privation to remark connected the Greenland matter, insisting the institution isn't political.

Some of the maritime disruptions person been blamed connected Russia’s alleged shadow fleet — aging lipid tankers operating nether opaque ownership to debar sanctions. One specified vessel, the Eagle S, was seized by Finnish constabulary successful December for allegedly damaging a powerfulness cable betwixt Finland and Estonia with its anchor.

Amid these concerns, NATO is moving to physique a layered maritime surveillance strategy combining uncrewed aboveground vehicles similar the Voyagers with accepted naval ships, satellites and seabed sensors.

“The situation is that you fundamentally request to beryllium connected the h2o each the time, and it’s humongously expensive," said Peter Viggo Jakobsen of the Royal Danish Defence College. “It’s simply excessively costly for america to person a warship trailing each azygous Russian ship, beryllium it a warship oregon a civilian freighter of immoderate kind.”

“We’re trying to enactment unneurotic a layered strategy that volition alteration america to support changeless monitoring of imaginable threats, but astatine a overmuch cheaper level than before,” helium added.