Deployment

Ocean Aero (founded 2012 in Gulfport, Mississippi by US Navy veterans, led by CEO Kevin Decker) makes the Triton, the only surface-and-subsea hybrid vehicle in the cohort and its genuine differentiator: a dual-mode autonomous underwater and surface vehicle that sails on wind and solar power for more than 30 days at up to about five knots on the surface and submerges for more than ten days to 100 meters at about two knots, at roughly 15 feet and 1,500 pounds with a minimal radar cross-section and payloads including cameras, side-scan sonar, and mine-neutralization gear in development. It is primarily a vessel maker that also runs some operations with its own personnel, on about $60.2 million raised including from James Fisher and Sons. The registry records it at pilot maturity with an explicit scale gap: it is a real fielded vehicle with named deployments, including continuous autonomous subsea surveillance at the Port of Gulfport since May 2025, a US Navy Task Force 59 evaluation since 2023, and Black Sea operations, but it has no sustained-scale evidence, with no cumulative nautical-mile or sea-day figures, and its stated manufacturing capacity of 360 to over 1,000 Tritons per year is capacity rather than units built, so it is held at pilot and flagged so it is not presented at parity with Saildrone. Its autonomy is genuine, since multi-day unattended submerged and surface transits are not remote-pilotable, but its scale is the open question, and any cumulative total, the world-first subsea-surveillance superlative, the production-capacity figures as actual output, NOAA contract specifics, current ownership, and operational mine neutralization are not verified.

Triton by Ocean Aero · Operated by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration · Catalog entry · 2 sources · not yet field-verified