Florida company 3D prints a drone boat using robotic arms

A Florida company that started out printing furniture with giant robotic arms is now applying that same technology to something considerably more consequential, building drone boats for the U.S. military layer by layer instead of piece by piece.

Haddy, a digital manufacturing company based in St. Petersburg, Florida, announced on Saturday that it has produced a vessel called the TF-179 Drone Boat using large-format robotic additive manufacturing, a process better known as industrial-scale 3D printing, in which robotic arms build up an object gradually from raw material rather than cutting or molding it from a single block.

Haddy released photos of the finished vessel alongside a statement explaining the company’s broader approach to reshaping how maritime hardware gets built.

“The maritime industry is redefining how vessels are designed and manufactured. The TF-179 Drone Boat is part of that evolution. Produced using large-format robotic additive manufacturing, projects like this demonstrate how digital manufacturing is enabling more agile development cycles, greater design flexibility, and a faster path from concept to deployment. As demand grows for specialized maritime platforms, manufacturing methods must evolve alongside them. The ability to rapidly produce, evaluate, and refine complex systems is becoming an increasingly important advantage. We’re proud to contribute to the technologies and partnerships helping shape the future of maritime manufacturing,” Haddy said.

Haddy did not disclose in its statement which customer commissioned the TF-179 or what mission the vessel is intended to perform, leaving those specific details unconfirmed for now. What is clear from the company’s broader track record, however, is that this kind of rapid, robot-built approach to unmanned vessels has become Haddy’s specialty over the past year, as demand for small, expendable maritime drones has surged across the U.S. defense industry.

Haddy operates out of a roughly 30,000 square foot (2,800 square meter) facility in downtown St. Petersburg equipped with eight large-format additive manufacturing systems built by the Dutch robotics firm CEAD, seven of which run on rails to extend their reach for producing especially large parts, according to a plant tour published by the trade publication CompositesWorld. The company was founded in 2022 by Jay Rogers, a former Marine and Princeton graduate who previously ran a similar 3D-printing venture called Local Motors, and it opened what it describes as the world’s largest 3D printing facility, based on total throughput and machine count, in April 2025 before expanding further as demand grew. What began as a business built around printing custom furniture, architectural elements and molds has increasingly pivoted toward defense work, using the same robotic printing process to produce items ranging from drone hulls to full-scale boat structures far faster than traditional shipbuilding methods typically allow.

That speed has already proven itself on at least one prior maritime defense project. Haddy partnered with HavocAI, a Rhode Island-based autonomous systems company, to 3D print the carbon-fiber-reinforced hull of a low-profile unmanned surface vehicle, a type of semi-submersible drone boat designed to sit low in the water to reduce its visibility to radar and other detection systems. According to CompositesWorld’s reporting on that collaboration, Haddy delivered a functional, testable vessel from design to sea trial in just nine days, a timeline that would be virtually unheard of using conventional boatbuilding techniques involving molds, hand layup and lengthy curing processes. Haddy has also formed a manufacturing partnership with Blue Ops, the maritime drone division of the publicly traded defense company Red Cat Holdings, to help double Blue Ops’ production capacity for its own line of uncrewed surface vessels, which the company has been selling to U.S. and allied militaries as smaller, cheaper alternatives to traditional crewed patrol boats.

The push behind all of this is a broader shift reshaping how militaries think about naval hardware, driven largely by lessons learned from Ukraine’s war against Russia, where inexpensive, remotely piloted drone boats have repeatedly damaged or destroyed far more expensive warships belonging to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. That success has pushed American and allied defense planners to prioritize speed and volume over the traditional, years-long shipbuilding timelines associated with crewed naval vessels, since a fleet of small, disposable drone boats can be replaced and iterated far faster than a single multimillion dollar warship ever could.

Robotic additive manufacturing fits neatly into that new calculus, because a company like Haddy can adjust a vessel’s design digitally and print a new version within days rather than retooling an entire physical production line, a flexibility that matters enormously when battlefield requirements are shifting as quickly as they have been in recent naval conflicts from the Black Sea to the Middle East.