Navy Funds Automated Underwater Acoustic Mapping
The $11.3 million development contract targets autonomous undersea systems, with no fielding date yet announced.
Updated on Nov. 6, 2026 in Quantum Computing
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The U.S. Navy has exercised an $11.3 million option with Integer Technologies, a small business, to develop software that maps underwater soundscapes from passive acoustic data. The work, called Operationalizing Marine Acoustics for Strategic Awareness, is performed in Durham, New Hampshire, through October 2029. The effort is a development contract in progress, not a fielded product.
Why it matters
The Navy wants automated tools that interpret undersea acoustic data to give forces decision support for undersea and seabed warfare. Pairing physics-based models with machine learning reflects a broader push to let autonomous vehicles adapt their missions on their own.
The contract records a $7.58 million obligation of fiscal 2026 Navy research funds against an $11.27 million full option value, with the rest funded in increments. The source does not report performance benchmarks or measured accuracy for the acoustic mapping software.
The players
Integer Technologies
A small business founded in 2021 in Columbia, South Carolina, developing acoustic and seabed-warfare software for the Navy.
Office of Naval Research
The Navy research office that issued the contract modification and awarded Integer a separate $23.1 million zero-trust cybersecurity contract.
University of New Hampshire
The state university with which Integer signed a five-year co-location agreement, giving the company a base in Durham.
The details
The effort builds a framework that combines physics-based models, which describe how sound travels through water, with machine learning, which learns patterns from data. Passive acoustic data is sound recorded by listening rather than emitting a signal, so the system must infer what is happening from ambient noise. The Navy plans for the software to process and interpret this data automatically so that autonomous vehicles can adapt their missions without a human operator. The tools are intended to run on both crewed and uncrewed platforms.
Timeline
June 2026: Integer signed a five-year co-location agreement with the University of New Hampshire.
July 2026: Integer took part in Exercise Lanternfish 2026.
August 2026: Integer received a $9.8 million option for a seabed warfare program.
November 5, 2026: The Department of War announced the option exercise.
The Tech Race
Integer's seabed work sits within the Office of Naval Research's seabed warfare program, alongside a $9.8 million August option shared with the University of Southern Mississippi. The stub does not describe how this effort compares with competing undersea-sensing programs.
The software is a development contract, so it is not available to users today. Its eventual reach depends on fielding timelines that the Navy has not announced in the source.
The takeaway
Watch for the Navy's next option exercise or fielding decision under contract N0001426C2208, which would show whether this acoustic software moves toward operational use. The University of New Hampshire co-location in Durham will also indicate how the work scales.
Further reading
For broader context on the sensing and computing methods behind this work, see Quantum Computing coverage.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Defence Blog.
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