Let's Talk about the Underwater Environmental Awareness Project
At first glance the Underwater Environmental Awareness project doesn’t seem like much. The name certainly leaves much to be desired, and if you try to search out info on the project you’ll be hard-pressed to find many details at all.
However, it is by far one of the most interesting projects on the docket, and one of the most important when we discuss Arctic surveillance. It is by far one of the projects I am personally most interested in seeing how it develops.
Yet for a long time I was hesitant to do a dedicated post about the project. It’s still in its earliest phases, we don't really have any competitors because of that, and the lack of details means we can only really speculate about what we'll see.
However, because I find this project so interesting, I thought it would be worth the effort to sit down, discuss what we know about the projects, and explore some possibilities for what might come out of the UEA Project.
So what is the UEA Project?
Officially, the Underwater Environmental Awareness Project aims to develop a new class of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV) capable of operating for long durations quietly, persistently, and far beyond the range of traditional manned platforms.
The UEA Project aims to accomplish two things: to extend Canada’s underwater surveillance network in the Arctic and littoral regions, primarily under the ice, and to gather environmental data critical for navigation, research, and defence.
In practice, these systems would be tasked with moving beneath the ice where satellites can’t really see and most ships can’t go, mapping seafloor terrain, tracking shifting ice coverage, and listening out for anything that might be prowling around the Arctic Archipelago.
They would work alongside other vessels, such as the AOPS, that could deploy, recover, and sustain them on station. The end goal of this would be to create a continuous underwater picture of Canada’s northern approaches, something that’s never existed before.
The UEA Project forms one part of the wider Canadian Arctic Sensor Suite Initiative, a CAF-level initiative aiming to create a continuous, persistent Arctic surveillance network from seabed to space. Other such projects include the Containerized On-Board Reelable Array (COBRA), the Over-The-Horizon Radar, and the Rapidly Deployable Fixed Array Sensor (RDFAS) projects.
RDFAS is something we will talk about in a bit as it is directly tied into UEA. For now though, let’s focus on the platform itself. While we don't know the exact size of the UUV being discussed, and I suspect there is still some debate, the platform I most hear about is an XLUUV.
An XLUUV — Extra-Large Uncrewed Underwater Vehicle — is essentially a fully autonomous miniature submarine built for endurance, payload capacity, and modularity. They bridge the gap between smaller AUVs and crewed submarines.
Unlike traditional torpedo-sized drones, XLUUVs operate on strategic scales, capable of months-long missions across thousands of nautical miles without human intervention. These platforms operate quietly, often at slow speeds and low acoustic signatures, acting as forward-deployed assets for navies seeking covert presence and asymmetric reach.
The UEA XLUUV would likely be something around 12m in length and ranging from ~9 tons to upwards of 20, depending on the payload and such. These would be equipped with either lithium batteries or something like hydrogen fuel cells to allow them to remain on station for several weeks at a time.
These would be highly customizable platforms, able to quickly swap different payloads for tasks like environmental monitoring, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), and infrastructure monitoring.
These payloads will likely include various sonars, electro-optical/infra-red surveillance systems, towed array sensors, and the ability to deploy smaller AUV or Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROUV). As far as I know, there's no immediate discussion on arming them.
This effectively puts the UEA UUV into the same category as platforms like the Anduril Australia Ghost Shark and MSubs XV Excalibur, but below the rather large Orca XLUUV from Boeing. It’s also highly likely, given Canada’s rather active Unmanned Underwater Vehicle sector, that we will prioritize a Canadian-made solution.
Really, we just don't know. We don’t have much info about the project, and what little I know has been laid out here in about three paragraphs. I should make note that the project doesn’t plan to actually deliver, as far as I know, until the mid-late 2030s, so there is still a long while to develop what exactly this will be.
I wouldn't be surprised though to see it deliver sooner. I haven't heard anything about it, but I could very easily see it pushed up given the ever-increasing desire to enhance our Arctic monitoring capabilities.
These would also complement the future Canadian Patrol Submarine, providing Canada an under-ice surveillance capability without needing to rely on the future CPS to handle those tasks. It also provides a form of unmanned partner that can work collaboratively in a form of Manned-Unmanned Teaming (MUM-T).
This provides a more cost-effective, persistent option for under-ice operations compared to using a traditional submarine. While modern diesel-electric submarines, with modern Air-Independent Propulsion and battery systems, can operate far better under the ice than their historical predecessors, their capabilities are still limited.
This isn't to say that they won’t take those ventures; however, they will not be the primary tool we use to, for example, patrol the Archipelago. That is somewhere that these XLUUV could, with the proper investment and development, excel.
Not only would a group of UUV be cheaper to operate and acquire, but they would be able to cover far more ground than the singular submarine or two loitering around. Future advancements in battery-swapping stations, investment in undersea infrastructure in the Northwest Passage, and the expansion of Canada's icebreaker fleet will also mean that many of these UUV could be operating autonomously for months at a time.
They'll also be able to go through the many tight and shallow areas of the Archipelago that traditional submarines wouldn't or are highly unlikely to go. Every sub, even nuclear ones, has their limits, be it size or stores. Again, these are not a replacement for these assets, far from it. They do have the potential to be a highly valuable complement in their own regard, especially if the support infrastructure is built up for them.
Of course, this isn't getting into the topic of likelihoods, of which if you are expecting things like Chinese nuclear submarines to start prowling around our Arctic backyard, then I have some disappointing news for you. I digress though, that's another topic for another time. We're here for UUV.
Canada and UUV
Canada has long been a pioneer in the AUV/UUV space. It's why I'm confident that we will see a Canadian-made solution. It's an industry, and history that we have rarely discussed at length here, or anywhere really. This is in spite of Canada, and Canadian companies being the leader of this space for decades.
Canada’s path into unmanned underwater vehicles began long before most of the world even had the affinity they do now for them. In 1974, on the industrial edges of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, International Submarine Engineering (ISE) was born out of a group of engineers who had already been building manned submersibles for offshore oil work.
Within a year they had produced the first commercial ROV in the North Sea, a stubby, tethered tool designed to work where divers couldn’t. By the late 1970s they’d fitted it with a manipulator arm, and the logical next question was simple: what if the vehicle didn’t need a tether?
By 1981, they had the answer. The Dolphin was unlike anything else built in North America, a semi-submersible, diesel-powered AUV that could operate for hours on its own, performing offshore surveys or mine countermeasure tests. In the same period, the United States was still experimenting with tethered systems, and the British were just beginning to draft concepts for what would later become Autosub.
ISE’s engineers were already charting seabed profiles autonomously in the Pacific. They were already pushing the boundaries for what an AUV could do, and in turn would be setting up the next three decades of developments.
The real leap came in 1983 with the Autonomous and Remotely Controlled Submersible (ARCS). Small by modern standards but revolutionary at the time, ARCS could navigate without surface control, recognize and avoid obstacles, and operate for ten hours at depth.
Its inertial navigation and Doppler sonar suite would become the blueprint for nearly every AUV to follow. By 1986, ARCS had logged more than 800 dives, experimented with a prototype aluminum–oxygen fuel cell that kept it running for over a day, and served as a test platform for Canada’s Defence Research Establishment Atlantic and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. In the age before GPS reached under the waves, a little Canadian company had built a robot that could think its way through darkness and pressure.
Then came Theseus. At the height of the Cold War, when under-ice surveillance was a matter of strategic necessity, the United States and Canada launched Project Spinnaker—a secretive plan to deploy acoustic listening arrays beneath the Arctic Ocean. ISE was contracted to design a vehicle that could do what none had done before: travel hundreds of kilometres under solid ice, laying fiber-optic cable as it went.
The result, completed in 1992, was a 10.7-metre, 8-tonne AUV named Theseus. In 1995 and again in 1996 it dove beneath a 2.5-metre-thick sheet of ice at Resolute Bay and laid two 220-kilometre cables. It stayed down for more than 60 hours at a stretch, a record at the time. Britain’s vaunted Autosub wouldn’t achieve comparable missions until five years later. For Arctic conditions, no other system came close.
We had built something that had done the impossible, something that now almost thirty years later UEA hopes to achieve once again. It didn’t stop there though.
While Theseus was laying cables under the ice, ISE’s Dolphin series was evolving into a mine-hunting platform. Two units were acquired by the U.S. Navy under a DARPA program during the Gulf War, equipped with Klein side-scan sonars and used to test remote minehunting from surface ships.
In 1995, a Dolphin operated alongside the destroyer USS John Young in one of the first ship-launched AUV trials. The success proved that autonomous mine warfare wasn’t a distant concept, it was already here.
From a Vancouver warehouse had come the DNA for some of the most capable underwater systems in the world. By the time other nations began to pour billions into autonomy and subsea warfare, Canada’s engineers had already done most of the hard work.
ARCS had mastered obstacle avoidance in 1983. Dolphin had proven remote minehunting by 1991. Theseus had conquered the Arctic in 1996. Every modern undersea vehicle carries a piece of that quiet legacy.
Even today Canada continues to be at the forefront. ISE is still around, still going strong with products like their Explorer AUV, the latest in their long legacy. The St. John's-based Kraken Robotics, best known for their line of Synthetic Aperture Sonars (SAS), Autonomous Launch and Recovery systems, and SeaPower line of lithium batteries not only secured a major sale just a few weeks ago but has seen their market cap cross $1 billion as of last month.
Cellula Robotics, based out of Burnaby, British Columbia, has been the biggest winner this year. Founded in 2001 by Eric Jackson, a longtime member of ISE who served as the company’s Manager of Robotics & Controls for over two decades, the company has often been touted as one of the likely candidates to provide Canada's future UUV fleet.
At the forefront of this effort is the Guardian AUV, formerly the Solus-XR. This XLUUV is engineered for extended missions and Arctic surveillance. With a length of 11.7 meters and a cross-section of about 1.66 meters, the platform supports either battery or hydrogen fuel-cell variants.
The fuel-cell version weighs approximately 8,000 kilograms, is rated for depths of 300, 1,000, or 3,000 meters, and delivers up to 38.5 days (925 hours) of endurance with a maximum range of 5,000 kilometers.
Payload and deployment flexibility play a key role in this. The Guardian offers modular payload bays (each about 1.2 × 1.2 × 1.7 meters) giving a total internal capacity of up to 5,000 litres for sensors, deployable effectors, or off-platform systems. It is designed to fit into a standard 40-foot ISO container for rapid ship or shore deployment, such as, say, on future icebreakers, destroyers, or corvettes.
It features station-keeping and hovering functionality, a retractable mast for communications, and redundant propulsion with a cruise speed of around 8 knots.
Complementing the Guardian, Cellula developed smaller and more specialized subsea systems, the Subsea Warden and Subsea Sentinel. Both are designed to provide extended underwater surveillance and data-gathering capabilities.
The Subsea Warden is a compact hovering AUV used primarily for vessel signature measurement and acoustic characterization, weighing around 130 kilograms with a 1.4-meter frame and a 100-meter depth rating. Its endurance of roughly six hours makes it ideal for localized survey and monitoring missions where agility and stability are critical.
The Subsea Sentinel, by contrast, is a fully autonomous seabed sensor node capable of long-term deployment without cables or surface support, designed to form distributed sensor networks across wide maritime zones.
Both systems can operate independently or in tandem with platforms like Guardian, effectively turning them into both a mothership and a mobile logistics platform for persistent underwater networks.
Subsea Sentinel is especially interesting when looking at the Rapidly Deployable Fixed Array Sensor (RDFAS) project. This was originally envisioned as a shore-based, containerized array system that could be rapidly deployed at fixed chokepoints for providing persistent undersea monitoring.
The project though has now developed into autonomous 'Barrier Sensor Arrays' able to be deployed at various pathways across the Archipelago. These will operate independent of any shore-based or fixed infrastructure, likely deployed from the future UEA UUV.
Cellula, pairing Guardian with Subsea Sentinel, has already been trialing this concept with their Vigilus node system. The company was awarded a new contract earlier this year by Defence Research and Development Canada to further trial and refine this concept.
They've also taken the Guardian international thanks to an ongoing Strategic Partnership with BAE Systems. Through this partnership, BAE has integrated their Nautomate mission control software into the Guardian platform. This platform, known as Herne, had previously bid on the Royal Navy's CETUS XLUUV but lost to the UK-based MSubs. We mentioned their XV Excalibur earlier.
Despite that, the two recently signed a 10-year exclusive agreement to continue working together on Herne. While Cellula will continue to develop and improve upon the Guardian platform, BAE will work to integrate new technologies and payloads into the platforms.
This could include things like the Archerfish Mine Disposal System, Depth Charges, and even the Stingray Lightweight Torpedo, giving Herne a future offensive capability.
To top it all off, Cellula just last month announced a new sale for Guardian to an undisclosed customer. The cherry on top to an already eventful and achieving year for the company.
This sale, and the Strategic Partnership with BAE, showcases the potential Canada could have in the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle space. This isn't being built off of just Canadian contracts. It's a mature, ready industry prepared to take an international role. These are companies who are exporting, with products ready to be delivered to customers.
It's an industry that is attracting international investment, with the Canadian supply chain already being built up by companies like Kraken Robotics and Geospectrum Technologies, with their modular communications solutions like Long Range Acoustic Messaging (LRAM) system and C-BASS family of VLF transducers.
It's the perfect example of an existing industrial base ready to take itself to the next level. We talk a lot about the Defence Industrial Base (DIB), especially with the budget upcoming and the first phases of the Defence Industrial Strategy in the works.
Oftentimes we forget about these more niche corners of the DIB, and the history that they carry. We forget that, despite the current state of things, we are a nation of pioneers, a nation of firsts. The talent has not left us. The companies who built these foundations are still here, as are the men and women who built them.
They've always been here, continuing to innovate and redefine what is capable even if we didn’t give them the attention and support they might have needed. ISE, Cellula, Kraken, Geospectrum, and many others have been built off the backs of a few, often without recognition for the work and achievements they have accomplished over the years.
Canadians always punch above our weight. We have always pushed ourselves to push the boundaries. We've always had the capabilities to do more, and now, as we are asking the DIB to step up, we need to be careful not to forget many of the small manufacturers and nicher industries that make up the wider DIB.
We forget ourselves sometimes, our achievements, our history. We forget what we can do. UEA asks a lot: an autonomous, Arctic-capable XLUUV able to operate for months at a time, deploying an autonomous sensor network across the seafloor.
Canadian companies don’t have the resources of larger companies like Boeing or Anduril. They don't have the funding or mandate that the United Kingdom has given with Project CABOT, which aims to provide a very similar capability by the early 2030s.
If we aren't vigilant, we risk losing our lead in this field, and in turn losing the opportunity to leverage an industry that has been building itself for decades just for this moment. I have no concerns that Canadian companies can deliver what we want.
They have proven themselves here time and time again, solution after solution. They're capable and ready to build a special industry here. We just have to make sure the people in charge remember they exist.
We don't know exactly what UEA will deliver, assuming its funded and such. We don't know when it will deliver, if in a decade or longer. There is still a lot to be seen.
At least we know we'll be ready when that choice is made.
Noce article, thanks. This would be an extremely challenging project WITH money. Without money or a timeline, I'd say it's dead in the water. Technical hurdles at a minimum would be: autonomous underwater navigation in areas not well (or at all) charted, underwater acoustics processing (just recording isn't good enough), other sensors?, communication (how?). I can think of dozens of other issues that would require a robust submarine technology base to even start cracking like self noise.....I remain ready to be convinced, but.....
Wow, great insights, thank you!