Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened solicitation DPA26BZ05-DV021 on 26 August for a two-person-portable autonomous underwater vehicle with up to 24 hours of operation, rapid-swappable payloads, open software interfaces, mesh communications and collaborative navigation1. It also requires a commercial transition plan after fleet testing.
DARPA's portability limit constrains everything above it. A vehicle two people can carry needs no crane, no well deck and no mothership, so it can be launched from a small boat or a beach, and endurance, payload and battery all have to fit inside what two pairs of arms will lift.
Buying a closed autonomy stack means buying its vendor for the life of the vehicle, because nobody else can write to the interfaces. DARPA has made openness a condition of entry rather than an aspiration for a later increment, and asked bidders to name the commercial route by which the thing gets built at volume once the fleet testing is done.
Europe has arrived at the same problem from the opposite end. The EU's iMUGS2 ground-robot consortium set a 2028 exercise in Norway to test one shared control standard across national systems. One buyer writes openness into the specification before anything is built; the other convenes a consortium to retrofit it across fleets that already exist.
