HD Hyundai VAone Anduril Lattice autonomous vessel is the headline change here, and the numbers behind it are starker than the announcement first suggested. A former U.S. Navy test vessel weighing 368 metric tons ran for three and a half hours off Long Beach, California on October 19, 2026 with no crew aboard, navigating autonomously and complying with international maritime collision rules while managing its own machinery and responding to a simulated propulsion failure without human input. The demonstration paired HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering’s VAone platform, standing for Vessel Autonomy-No.1 and Only1, with Anduril Industries’ Lattice mission autonomy software, marking the first time the combined architecture has run in American waters before institutional witnesses from five organizations including the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the American Bureau of Shipping, the Republic of Korea Navy, and South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration.
What the HD Hyundai VAone Anduril Lattice autonomous vessel exercise covered
The exercise ran four consecutive autonomy scenarios designed to exercise distinct layers of the integrated stack. The first tested standard autonomous navigation in open water, the second required the vessel to reprioritize mid-mission without remote reprogramming, the third demonstrated coordinated formation sailing with a second hull, and the fourth simulated a propulsion failure requiring the ship to detect the casualty, reconfigure, and keep operating. About 40 attendees from HD KSOE, Anduril, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, ABS, the Republic of Korea Navy, and DAPA observed from a shore-based control station that received the run in real time.
Jang Kwang-pil, Executive Vice President and head of HD KSOE’s Future Technology Research Institute, framed the significance plainly. “This demonstration is significant because it confirmed the ability of an unmanned surface vessel to carry out complex missions and respond to a variety of operational situations that may arise after leaving port,” he said, adding that HD KSOE will continue refining the technology to secure a leading position in the unmanned surface vessel market. The presence of DAPA officials alongside their U.S. Navy counterparts signaled bilateral institutional endorsement of the partnership for defense export purposes rather than a ceremonial gesture.
How the two-layer architecture divides responsibility
VAone sits at the ship level and is built on HiNAS Prime, the navigation platform developed by Avikus, HD Hyundai’s autonomous navigation subsidiary, which received DNV Type Approval in April 2026 as the first mass-produced autonomous navigation support system certified across multiple vessel types. VAone layers navigation, continuous machinery management of propulsion, power, and auxiliary systems with anomaly detection and automatic response, and damage control that identifies hull or system failures and initiates corrective action, with a weapons autonomy layer described in HD KSOE documentation but not publicly demonstrated in this exercise.
Lattice sits above the ship-level stack and handles mission planning, execution, and cross-platform coordination, and is hardware-agnostic, already fielded on Royal Australian Navy Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous underwater vehicles, the Roadrunner interceptor, and counter-drone systems deployed by U.S. Special Operations Command. Putting a 368-metric-ton surface vessel on the same Lattice mesh means a single operator could, in principle, coordinate surface, subsurface, and aerial autonomous assets through a common multi-domain command interface rather than managing separate systems, while VAone keeps the hull alive and Lattice decides the mission.
Why the timing matters for the Navy’s MUSV marketplace
The U.S. Navy’s Phase I Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel marketplace evaluated seven participants, including Galliano Marine Services, HII, Saronic, Sea Machines, PacMar Technology, Birdon America, and Leidos, against a defined set of performance criteria: 2,500 nautical miles of range at 25 knots in sea state 4, a 55,000-pound payload in two standard containers, and autonomous navigation across a 26-hour test sequence. That standard is essentially a navigation and endurance test that confirms COLREGs compliance, the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, but does not address what happens when machinery fails or the hull is damaged at sea, the continuous engineering and damage control functions a crewed warship devotes substantial personnel to.
HD Hyundai and Anduril did not appear on the May 2026 Phase I participant list, with Anduril having submitted a Phase I bid in April through partner Edison Chouest, whose Galliano Marine Services affiliate was selected separately without Anduril. The Navy’s MUSV Phase II is a rolling marketplace designed to admit additional vendors who demonstrate operational capability after Phase I testing closes in October 2026, and today’s Long Beach exercise lands squarely in that credentialing window, demonstrating to program overseers that the stack operates and goes beyond what Phase I required.
The production platform under construction at HD Hyundai’s Ulsan shipyard under the firm’s design-and-build contract with Anduril is approximately 60 meters long, displaces more than 500 metric tons, and will be followed by a U.S. coastal demonstration next month, with both firms targeting U.S. and global USV markets. The HD Hyundai VAone Anduril Lattice autonomous vessel integration also extends to weapons autonomy per HD KSOE’s architecture, though that layer was not exercised publicly, and the same Lattice mesh already ties together Anduril submarines, aircraft, and counter-drone systems across domains.
Source: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/329247/20261020/navigation-not-enough-hd-hyundai-anduril-prove-full-ship-autonomy-long-beach.htm