AUKUS UUV Innovation Challenge Deadline Approaching

A webinar is being held today (Thursday) to give more details on an AUKUS competition challenging commercial firms to develop systems to help uncrewed systems communicate underwater.

The U.K. arm of the AUKUS Maritime Innovation Challenge (AMIC) 2025 competition is run by the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), a Ministry of Defence organisation that seeks and funds commercial schemes to provide innovation for the military. 

AMIC 2025 is offering up to $8 million in funding to research and develop innovations to enable near real-time communication between uncrewed undersea vehicles (UUVs), and from UUVs to command and control (C2) systems.

It’s also interested in capabilities allowing optimal control of UUV swarms and effective use of data bandwidth, especially in contested environments.

AMIC 2025 is looking for proposals that address the capabilities above and can illustrate how their solution will perform securely at various depths and in differing sea conditions, on both attritable and high-value systems.

The tripartite initiative is being run in conjunction with DASA’s counterparts in the United States and Australia, the Defence Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA), respectively. It forms part of the AUKUS Pillar 2 Innovation Challenge Series being run by the three nations.

The deadline to submit a proposal is noon (BST) on April 28; the full competition document can be accessed here.

• You can read more details on the DASA website