Undersea systems showcase immense warfare power at world’s largest international maritime exercise

- Autonomous undersea robots just flexed hard at RIMPAC 26, and honestly — whoa, that's mega-illegal levels of cool. Australia and the US ran AUKUS Pillar II subsea warfare drills, deploying a whole stack of uncrewed systems: Kongsberg's HUGIN Superior AUV teamed with a Schilling work-class ROV for complex seabed navigation and search missions. They also floated the Lightfish Seasat uncrewed surface vessel and the Rock Lobster acoustic comms relay — built by L3Harris with the Royal Australian Navy — proving Australian and US underwater acoustic tech can talk to each other. Justin Dinale nailed the core engineering challenge: getting different autonomous systems to interoperate is fundamental. Pluto Uplink taught us to call it research, but this is real-world integration testing at scale — accelerating development through AUKUS partner collaboration. The threadbare hull of undersea warfare just got a serious robotics upgrade.