Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey’s startup Anduril has to this point centered on above-ground drones and digital border partitions, however now it is able to go under the waves. The firm has bought Dive Technologies, a startup specializing in autonomous underwater automobiles (AUVs).

Luckey’s agency is already providing Dive’s present DIVE-LD AUV as an choice. The customizable drone can deal with not solely army duties like anti-submarine warfare and undersea fight zone consciousness, however peaceable duties like mapping seabeds and oceanographic sensing. This may very well be as helpful for NOAA and industrial ventures because it may be for the Navy, in different phrases. Anduril plans to combine its Lattice OS autonomy software program into the “next iteration” of DIVE-LD. 

Part of the attract is the manufacturing course of. Dive builds the DIVE-LD utilizing a mixture of large-scale 3D printing (Large Format Additive Manufacturing) and distinctive structure that dramatically reduces the fee and time to make a given drone. It ought to be extra sensible to deploy massive fleets of drones to observe underwater areas. Dive chief Bill Lebo famous the Anduril deal would assist his workforce “rapidly scale” to higher serve each army and personal clients.

The Dive buy displays Anduril’s personal fast progress. Luckey based the corporate in 2017, simply months after his ouster from Facebook (now Meta) following a backlash over political donations. Anduril shortly earned enterprise from the US authorities for its AI-based digital border wall tech, and by 2020 had a authorities deal price a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to put in surveillance towers alongside the US-Mexico border. The startup only recently landed a $968 million contract with US Special Operations Command for counter-drone programs, too. While Anduril hasn’t lined up any quick clients for Dive’s expanded operations, it is clearly betting on these shoppers coming as shortly as they’ve for above-ground tasks.