Blue Water Autonomy: Building a Ship-Sized Robot for the USN @ Conrad

For all the noise surrounding artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, the maritime industry's most difficult autonomy problems remain stubbornly physical. Keeping a 190-foot ship operating reliably for months without engineers in the machinery space is an entirely different proposition than teaching a small drone to navigate from Point A to Point B.

That distinction sits at the heart of Blue Water Autonomy, the relatively young Boston-based technology company now putting steel behind its thesis with construction of the first Liberty Class Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) at Conrad Shipyard in Louisiana.

Blue Water is attempting to marry two disciplines that historically haven't always traveled together: proven, production-scale commercial shipbuilding and sophisticated robotics. Its approach is equally notable for what the company decided not to develop. Rather than inventing a hull, Blue Water licensed Damen's proven Stan Patrol 6009 platform, wrapped its autonomous technology around that foundation, and concentrated much of its engineering effort on what co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Austin Gray sees as the more difficult problem: creating machinery, electrical, navigation and perception systems capable of functioning reliably without people aboard.

The resulting Liberty Class is a 190-foot steel vessel with more than 10,000 nautical miles of range, payload capacity exceeding 150 metric tons and endurance measured not in hours or days, but months. Construction started at Conrad in March 2026, with Blue Water targeting completion of the first vessel later this year.

From Ukraine to the Pacific

Blue Water's origins illustrate how rapidly lessons from modern warfare are migrating into the maritime domain.

Gray served as a U.S. Navy intelligence officer before attending business school and subsequently traveling to Ukraine, where he worked in a drone factory. Watching relatively small aerial and ground drones being manufactured and employed at scale led him back to a very different operational problem he remembered from the Navy.

The Pacific is enormous, while many of the payloads around which naval warfare is built — missiles, radar systems, communications equipment and other mission packages — are heavy and power hungry. The small-drone model only scales so far.

“I couldn't stop thinking about my experience in the Navy,” Gray said. “Out in the Pacific we need some big ship-size drones to cross the Pacific to carry big payloads the Navy's built around.”

Gray immersed himself in the problem, speaking with what he estimates were roughly 1,000 people before joining forces with co-founder Rylan Hamilton, who had previously built and sold a robotics company. Scott Sanders subsequently joined the founding team, and Blue Water Autonomy incorporated in April 2024.

The growth since then has been fast. Blue Water today counts approximately 60 full-time employees and closer to 100 people when contractors are included, with offices in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and smaller operations in Louisiana and San Diego. The company has raised more than $60 million, including a $50 million Series A led by GV, formerly Google Ventures.

That private funding is an important piece of the Blue Water strategy. The company says Liberty has been developed entirely with private capital, working with more than 100 suppliers, rather than waiting for the traditional government-funded ship development cycle.

Photo courtesy Blue Water Autonomy

We started Blue Water with reliability. Let's build a robot that just works. The first thing we focused on is let's build a really reliable autonomous engine room, an engine room that generates power and propels the vessel with no humans there.”

- Austin Gray,
co-founder & CSO, Blue Water Autonomy

Starting in the Engine Room

Ask Gray what differentiates Blue Water technologically and he doesn't begin with AI.

He starts in the engine room.

“We started Blue Water with reliability. Let's build a robot that just works,” Gray said. “The first thing we focused on is let's build a really reliable autonomous engine room, an engine room that generates power and propels the vessel with no humans there.”

Blue Water's architecture employs multiple engines packaged in 20-foot containers operating as part of a microgrid. The engines generate electricity for both propulsion and mission payloads. That arrangement is intended to provide the redundancy and fault tolerance necessary for a vessel expected to operate 60 to 90 days without crew intervention.

That is a deceptively important distinction. Navigation autonomy tends to attract attention because it is visible: sensors perceive another vessel and software determines how to maneuver around it. But an unmanned ocean-going vessel also has to detect, diagnose and respond to machinery faults that traditionally send an engineer scrambling down a ladder.

Blue Water says Liberty was consequently redesigned from the inside out, starting with the engine room and extending through mechanical and electrical systems and fault-tolerant propulsion. Automated control and fault management are designed to limit the need for human intervention during months-long deployments.

Gray argues that scale matters here. Technology developed for small USVs cannot simply be enlarged and dropped onto an oceangoing ship.

“It's a whole different form factor,” he said. “You need different sensors, different compute, different payload. A lot of it's just different.”

Liberty's navigation and perception architecture includes a high-end mast-mounted sensor suite intended to provide situational awareness at night, in fog and in other difficult operating environments, including situations where communications are degraded or unavailable. Blue Water describes the vessel as incorporating Level 4 autonomy and marine AI. The platform also provides the payload flexibility increasingly sought by the Navy. Its large aft working deck can accommodate four 40-foot containers, creating a modular platform that could carry missiles, sensors, communications equipment, drones, logistics packages or other containerized payloads.

For Gray, modularity also creates tactical uncertainty. An adversary seeing a Liberty Class vessel would not necessarily know what is inside its containers—and therefore what mission that particular ship is performing.

Don't Reinvent the Hull

Perhaps Blue Water's most commercially maritime decision was recognizing where not to innovate.

Instead of spending time and capital developing and validating a completely new hull, Blue Water partnered with Damen and selected the Dutch shipbuilder's Stan Patrol 6009 design.

The hull incorporates Damen's Axe Bow, characterized by a near-vertical wave-piercing bow intended to reduce slamming and provide smoother re-entry into waves. More than 300 Axe Bow vessels are operating globally, giving Blue Water a substantial body of real-world experience upon which to base its autonomous vessel.

“We didn't feel like we needed to reinvent a new hull design from scratch,” Gray said.

It is an approach that ought to resonate with the commercial marine market. Autonomy already introduces significant technical and regulatory uncertainty; adding an unproven hull form to the equation merely stacks another layer of risk onto the project.

Damen is supporting Liberty through its Damen Technical Cooperation licensing model, an approach the company has used with shipyards internationally and in the United States. Blue Water can therefore concentrate on its proprietary autonomous systems while Conrad concentrates on something it knows exceedingly well: building steel boats.

That division of labor brings us to Louisiana.

Conrad operates five shipyards with approximately 1,100 employees and produces more than 30 vessels annually, according to Blue Water. Its production infrastructure includes automated panel-line and welding capabilities that support parallel construction and potentially much higher throughput than a startup-owned specialty facility.

“We picked Conrad because they're the right size yard for a project like this,” Gray said. “They can easily absorb this capacity. They're excited about the opportunity to prototype the first one and they're able and excited about the opportunity to go to production at scale, which is what the Navy wants.”

As of Gray's interview, multiple hull modules were coming together at Conrad. The relationship also explains why Blue Water has little immediate appetite for buying its own shipyard. Gray sees considerably more value in tapping existing U.S. industrial capacity than assuming the capital requirements and operational headaches of running a smaller facility capable of producing only a handful of vessels annually.

Beyond Hull No. 1

If Liberty performs as advertised, Hull No. 1 is intended to be just that—the first.

Blue Water's stated objective following delivery is serial production at a rate of 10 to 20 vessels annually. The Liberty name deliberately recalls the famous Liberty ships of World War II and their production philosophy: build a capable standardized platform rapidly, repeatedly and using available industrial capacity.

There are, nevertheless, competitive realities ahead. Blue Water was not among the initial seven companies selected in the Navy's recent MUSV competition. Gray does not view that as closing the door.

“We were not on the initial list,” he acknowledged. “I think there are multiple tranches of medium USV. I think there's multiple other things in the works behind the scenes, which I can't really go fully into right now, but the TLDR is we're still very much in it.”

For now, defense remains the logical beachhead. Commercial autonomous shipping continues to face regulatory and certification questions that military operators can navigate differently. Gray describes Blue Water as a dual-use commercial company and sees potential commercial markets in the future, but says the naval sector currently represents the more mature opportunity.

The next year, therefore, is less about promising what autonomy eventually could do than demonstrating what Blue Water's technology actually can do. Investment remains concentrated on autonomous machinery, navigation and perception, meeting Navy testing requirements and getting Liberty from modules on a Louisiana production floor to a functioning oceangoing robot.

That is ultimately the more interesting part of the Blue Water story. The maritime autonomy conversation has moved well beyond whether software can steer a boat. The bigger challenge is whether industry can build autonomous ships that are sufficiently reliable, useful, affordable and producible to become fleet assets rather than technology demonstrations.

Blue Water is betting that the solution will require neither Silicon Valley alone nor traditional shipbuilding alone, but a deliberate combination of robotics, proven naval architecture and existing U.S. shipyard capacity.

As Gray put it, his team brings something unusual to that equation: “You've got to be able to fuse shipbuilding and robotics in order to, I think, deploy a robot of this complexity.”

With the first 190-foot Liberty now taking physical shape at Conrad, Blue Water Autonomy is about to find out whether that fusion can make the transition from an ambitious startup thesis to an operational fleet.