We keep saying maritime autonomy is all the rage, but multi-domain autonomy is really where it’s at.
This morning, Rhode Island-based unmanned surface vehicle (USV) startup HavocAI announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it has acquired not one but two companies—heavy-lift drone-maker Mavrik and industrial vehicle autonomy startup Teleo—to take its autonomy software multi-domain.
We’re talking air, land, and sea, baby.
Multi-domain moves: HavocAI may have cut its teeth on the water, especially with its ever-popular 14-foot Rampage USVs, but, as CEO Paul Lwin told Tectonic, moving into all-domain autonomy was only a matter of time.
“From the beginning, we architected 90 percent of our tech stack to not care what the platform is—that 90 percent is the decision-making, how the models and algorithms let autonomous robots work together,” he said. “About a year ago, once our maritime software was proven to be mature, we started putting it on quadcopters and then ground rovers to prove that the software could control it without changing a single line of code.”
Add to cart: After raising $85M last October, Havoc had some cash to make that multi-domain move happen, and fast. They started shopping around the following month, and Mavrik and Teleo fit the bill (Lwin couldn’t disclose any numbers).
Powerlifting: Founded in 2018, Mavrik, based in Long Beach, California, has made some serious noise in the heavy-lift drone space.
- The startup’s flagship product, HATCHET, is a big ‘ole quadcopter with a maximum range of 350 miles, a payload capacity of 450 pounds, and 12 hours of endurance. It’s designed for missions ranging from logistics to casualty evacuation (CASEVAC) and ISR.
- HATCHET was a winner in last year’s Army xTechOverwatch competition after completing four fully autonomous resupply missions.
- The Army was clearly paying attention and awarded the startup with a $2M SBIR contract last month to supply the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division with HATCHET drones for sustainment, resupply, and CASEVAC operations.
That validation from the Army made Mavrik an easy buy for Lwin. “I’ve told some general officers that I bought a UAV company, and some of them have jokingly said, ‘Oh God, I hope you bought Mavrik.’” He said. “It’s a company that’s moving really fast, and they are building phenomenal tech.”
Ground and pound: On the ground autonomy side, Teleo isn’t a major player in defense, but HavocAI aims to make it one.
- Teleo, which emerged from Y Combinator in 2020, focuses on supervised autonomy for heavy machinery in the mining and construction industries.
- Their software and hardware kit retrofits those construction vehicles into remote-controlled robots, allowing operators to control multiple on the same platform.
- By joining the Havoc squad, Lwin has his eye on making “large truck convoys, Humvees, even M1 tanks autonomous,” he said. “We’re not playing in the small ground vehicle space. We’re talking really big ground vehicles.”
Race to integrate: Given that Havoc’s collaborative autonomy stack is designed—and tested—for air, land, and, of course, maritime autonomy, bringing them into the fold should be a breeze, and offers the military the joint force of robots it’s looking for.
“From an operator standpoint, we don’t do anything isolated—the joint force, ground, sea, air, all have to work together, and autonomous vessels have to do the same thing,” Lwin said. “But right now, you’ve got all these companies [across domains] working separately, and there’s nothing that connects them.”
Eyes on the prize: Under the Havoc umbrella, bringing in Mavrik and Teleo opens the door for those different vehicles to collaborate, and they’re already eyeing the DIU’s recent solicitation for the Autonomous Low Profile Vessel (ALPV) program, designed to facilitate low-cost logistics transport and resupply in littoral environments, as a first fit.
“That’s the use case—when [the DIU] says Ship to Shore, it’s about getting the supplies from the beach, or the littoral, to a base on an island,” Lwin said. In other words, Havoc’s USVs carry the goods, Mavrik’s HATCHET lifts them onto the land, and Teleo’s UGVs transport them where they need to go, all autonomously and on the same software platform.
“These are robots that happen to float, happened to fly, or happened to go on the ground, but at the end of the day, it’s our software controlling them,” Lwin added. “You’re not going to have to care whether it’s an aircraft or a ground vehicle. If you want to do something, you can now control it just like we do with our boats.”