Somewhere off the coast of Western Australia, hundreds of meters below the surface of the Indian Ocean, there is a certain kind of silence. Not a wave. There is no wind. Just darkness, pressure, and more and more the hum of machines that no one is operating. Although the transition from human divers and tethered equipment to fully autonomous underwater systems has been developing for years, there has been a noticeable change over the past five years. People in the industry still discuss the capability jump with a hint of skepticism because it has been so steep.
The chief technology officer and co-founder of BlueZone Group, Darren Burrowes, has observed this change firsthand. His company, which operates out of Bibra Lake near Rockingham, has spent twenty years integrating and modernizing underwater systems, primarily due to the demands of Western Australia’s offshore oil and gas industry. Almost no other client could push the technology as hard as that industry, which is infamously harsh about costs and downtime. The outcome is a local knowledge base that is currently garnering significant defense interest. Smart underwater systems have the potential to be a ten-billion-dollar market for the Royal Australian Navy, and businesses like BlueZone are closer to the center of that discussion than most outsiders would anticipate.
Although processing power and battery life are important, they are not the only things that have changed. It’s the idea of autonomy itself. For many years, dependable workhorses attached to surface ships have been known as remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. They are guided by human operators who watch grainy video feeds. AUVs, or autonomous underwater vehicles, are different. They decide what to do. They don’t need a joystick to navigate, adjust, or gather data. Burrowes works for Hydroid, the US company that has taken the lead in this market, and it’s interesting to see how their cars have changed over the course of a few product cycles. On a pre-programmed mission, a single machine can now perform tasks that previously required support vessels and three-person teams.
The defense implications are real and can be either comforting or unsettling, depending on your point of view. The navy’s interest in what is known as RAS-AI, or Robotics and Autonomous Systems with Artificial Intelligence, reflects the fact that Australia’s strategic environment has become significantly more complex in recent years. Subsurface mapping, mine countermeasures, and underwater surveillance are not abstract priorities.
Burrowes is fairly direct about where he believes Australian companies can make the biggest contributions, though it’s still unclear how quickly sovereign capability will develop compared to what is bought off the shelf from allied manufacturers. Developing the payloads—the sensors, instruments, and specialized tools that are installed on the vehicles—is more important than building the vehicles themselves.
This technology has an environmental component outside of the strictly military realm that isn’t always discussed in the same context. Surprisingly, the ocean floor is still less mapped than the Mars surface. That is starting to change thanks to robots. AI-guided underwater systems are being used by the German company Planblue to map the seafloor in detail, which was previously just not feasible. In June 2025, researchers from the University of Sydney used underwater robots to take pictures of reef ecosystems and create three-dimensional models. This type of baseline data is crucial for conservation efforts.
The industry seems to have moved past the question of whether autonomous underwater systems are effective. The dispute has been resolved. These days, the issues are more complex: who constructs the essential parts, who manages the data, and how soon the gap between what commercial platforms can accomplish and what defense truly requires can be closed. With its extensive maritime territory, strong offshore industry roots, and real urgency, Australia’s geography works to its advantage. The next ten years will determine whether that results in long-term sovereign capability or just strategically placed purchasing contracts.
