India is all set to take a giant leap forward with the development of multipurpose Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) and submadrones, underwater drones.

DRDO) has come a long way in indigenously designing and building a batch of multiple AUVs to meet the Navy’s quality requirements of 10 such platforms primarily for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), mine mitigation and sensor deployment.

The Naval Science and Technology Laboratory (NSTL), a DRDO firm based in Visakhapatnam has transformed a bunch of AUVs from handheld slow-speed ones, to military-class with the competence to serve in the whole range of maritime security, spanning coastal and port defence to deep-sea operations.

For the time being, the NSTL’s motivated programme ‘Autonomous Sea Vehicle’ (ASV), strives for building under-water vehicles ranging from Micro-AUVs weighing 10 Kg to giant Unmanned Combat Undersea Vehicles (UCUV) weighing over 12 tonnes on the tune of the US Navy’s ‘Manta Unmanned Underwater Vehicle’ programme.