With Denmark, Saildrone logs first flag registration for naval surveillance drone

WARSAW, Poland — U.S. company Saildrone has announced that the first four Voyager unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have been registered under the Danish flag, marking the first time the producer’s vehicle operate under a national flag.

The development comes as Saildrone is working with partners in the Netherlands, Norway and Poland to ramp up its USV production for European customers, including militaries.

Kim Løye Sørensen, the European head of business development at Saildrone Denmark, the company’s subsidiary that manages its operations in Europe, told Defense News the firm is observing a rising demand for surface drones across the continent, and is in talks with a number of navies.

“We’ve had a collaboration with the Danish Navy where we had four of our Voyager platforms … in operation for the Danish Navy for a six-month period,” Sørensen said. “Now the Danish Navy and the Danish government are in the process of creating a new contract to have more Saildrones within the Danish Armed Forces. But in the near future we also see our drones operating in different European countries in the northern part of Europe.”

Due to Denmark’s location between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, the Royal Danish Navy plays a strategic role in monitoring and safeguarding maritime traffic through the Danish Straits, a gateway between the two seas.

The 33-foot Voyager is designed for coastal surveillance and nearshore mapping missions, performing continuous maritime intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), seafloor characterization, as well as real-time domain awareness, according to data from Saildrone. Powered by an electric motor and enabled with a mapping speed of 5 knots, the USV can operate for 100 days between service stops.

Voyager USVs can perform “maritime domain awareness and the ISR for a long period of time. More than three months out in station and being out there without doing anything, just being a forwarding sensor providing the data,” Sørensen said.

In addition to the Voyager, Explorer and Surveyor platforms, Saildrone is also developing a new product, Spectre, a 170-foot USV that will join the portfolio as its largest and fastest platform that will carry weapons.

“With our Spectre platform, there will be kinetic effectors,” Sørensen said. “It’s a container-based solution. You could either have two 40-foot containers or five 20-foot containers of various payloads, including kinetics on that platform. That will be built in 2027.”