Saronic launches 52ft autonomous surface vessel

Saronic has launched its first Mirage, a 52ft dual-use autonomous surface vessel (ASV), which joins the 24ft Corsair and 180ft Marauder as the third platform in the company’s fleet.

Mirage went from initial design to launch in under a year and will now begin on-water trials at Saronic’s privately funded test facility in Galveston, Texas, with the next hull already on the production line at the company’s Austin headquarters.

“We launched our first Marauder four weeks ago, and today we’re putting another vessel in the water. This cadence is what our production model was built to deliver,” says Dino Mavrookas, co-founder and CEO of Saronic. “With Corsair, Mirage, and Marauder now in full production simultaneously, we are delivering a full family of autonomous surface vessels at the speed and scale that makes real adoption possible.”

Autonomous vessel operations

Mirage is designed to extend the reach and capability of crewed and uncrewed teams across a range of maritime operations. With a top speed of more than 35 knots, a range exceeding 2,500 nautical miles, and a payload capacity of around 1,590kg, Saronic says the first Mirage more than doubles the range and payload capacity of its 24ft Corsair.

Operating fully autonomously or under remote human supervision through Saronic’s Echelon command-and-control platform, the company says Mirage will support maritime domain awareness, maritime security, and aerial and surface detection missions.

Integrated systems

Saronic says the 52ft ASV runs on the same core autonomy stack that it has developed and tested through its other vessels. Passive perception and collaborative autonomy capabilities, including navigation, tracking, and detection, are enabled by redundant communications and control interfaces.

The company says its open, modular architecture enables the integration of a range of government-off-the-shelf and commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and software, including mission payloads, sensor packages, and command-and-control systems, without reengineering the underlying platform.

Manufacturing and testing

Mirage is designed and manufactured at Saronic’s Austin headquarters, where the company develops its hardware and software as a single integrated system. The Austin facility has the capacity to produce hundreds of Mirage vessels per year alongside thousands of Corsair vessels, according to the company.

The first Mirage hull has arrived at Saronic’s test facility in Galveston, the company’s primary on-water test site on the Gulf Coast, to begin trials.

According to Saronic, the trials are designed to validate the vessel’s performance across its full design envelope alongside continued Corsair testing at the site.

The launch of Mirage comes as autonomous vessel technology continues to develop across the maritime sector, with companies exploring new applications for uncrewed systems and remote operations.