Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Market Size, Share, Industry Report, and Growth Drivers 2028

The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) market was valued at USD 1.6 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 4.9 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 22.4% from 2023 to 2028. Factors such as the high operational costs of AUVs are restraints for the market's growth.

Driver: Rising defense spending in several countries worldwide

Security issues, concerns over contested territories, and threats have significantly increased defense spending worldwide. For instance, according to new data on global military expenditure published on April 2023 by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the total global military expenditure increased by 3.7% in real terms in 2022 to reach USD 2240 billion. The three largest spenders in 2022—the US, China, and Russia—accounted for 56% of the world's total.

According to the US intelligence community's Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) 2023, Beijing will continue to apply pressure and offer inducements for Taiwan to move toward unification. It will react to what it views as increased US–Taiwan engagement. Beijing may build on its actions from 2022, which could include more Taiwan Strait centerline crossings or missile overflights of Taiwan. In the South China Sea, Beijing will continue to use growing numbers of air, naval, coast guard, and militia forces to intimidate rival claimants and to attempt to signal that China has effective control over contested areas. Similarly, China is pressuring Japan over contested areas in the East China Sea.

Countries across the world are using forefront technologies to safeguard their borders against underwater threats. In the present global scenario, there has been an increase in threats from pirates, terrorists, and seafarers. This is creating security issues across marine borders. For instance, in July 2021, there was an attack by pirates on an oil tanker (that was linked to an Israel-based billionaire) off Oman in the Arabian Sea. Also, according to a UN report in 2019, seabeds are becoming a tangle of ungoverned seabed cables, posing a new threat to international peace and security.

Restraint: High operational costs of AUVs

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have high operational costs. Several factors that contribute to the overall cost of operating AUVs are development and acquisition, maintenance and repairs, training, and personnel, mission-specific costs, logistics and support, and data processing and analysis. These are expensive maritime systems. For instance, the A18 AUV (Exail Technologies SA), with a depth rating of up to 3,000 m, has a cost ranging from USD 2–6 million. The deployment costs of AUVs used in exploration or surveying activities add to the actual cost of exploration and surveying missions. Moreover, the prohibitive costs of maintenance, manufacturing, research & development, and system complexity associated with AUVs also result in slow adoption. However, they are increasingly used in simple missions such as environmental monitoring.

Opportunity: Upcoming expansion of Internet through 5G driving demand for underwater cables

Since the first underwater optical fiber cable came out in 1985, underwater cable systems have played a key role in the field of cross-continental communications. These systems offer several advantages, such as large capacity, high reliability, and excellent communication quality. However, underwater telecommunication cables are prone to suffer from potentially hazardous or environmental damages caused by natural causes, such as earthquakes and turbulent currents, or human activities (anchoring and fishing gear). AUVs are used extensively to resolve these issues. Also, AUVs are used in the maintenance and damage recovery for underwater connectors (also known as marine connectors or subsea connectors). These connectors are designed to withstand extreme environments, including corrosive seawater and pressure and vibration and shock, but they can sometimes fail in harsh ocean environments.

It is essential to track the cable route to inspect the condition of the buried cable and protect its surviving seabed environment. Several technologies, such as underwater cameras, side-scan sonar, sub-bottom profilers, and magnetic sensors, are used for these applications. However, to find these types of cables, the magnetic sensors embedded inside AUVs are used widely for tracking the cable route.

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Challenges: Operational hindrances such as natural ocean hazards and bad ocean weather

Deep-water AUVs can dive close to the seabed (<5 m altitude in areas of low relief). This means that they can collect seafloor mapping, profiling, and imaging data with far higher spatial resolution and navigational accuracy than surface vessels and towed instruments. As a result, AUVs are widely used in these challenging environments. AUVs are currently used in different applications, such as oceanography and archeology. However, AUV survival is a concern in these environments. Consequently, the data being gathered by AUVs could be lost because of the risk of vehicle loss due to natural hazards. This factor not only has financial implications (resulting from equipment loss) but also can result in increased research timelines due to the loss of important data.

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