A former U.S. Navy test vessel weighing 368 metric tons (406 US short tons) ran for three and a half hours off Long Beach, California today with no crew aboard — not only navigating autonomously and complying with maritime collision regulations, but managing its own machinery and responding to a simulated propulsion failure without human input. The vessel was running HD Hyundai’s VAone platform stacked on top of Anduril Industries’ Lattice OS, and the exercise marked the first time that combined architecture has been demonstrated in American waters in front of institutional witnesses from five organizations, including the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, and South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA).

Navigation autonomy — keeping a ship on course, avoiding collisions, obeying the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea — was the challenge that defined the Navy’s Phase I autonomous surface vessel competition. What happened off Long Beach today went a layer deeper: machinery management and damage control running without crew intervention, integrated into the same cross-domain command mesh that Anduril has fielded on submarines, aircraft, and counter-drone systems. That is the distinction this article is about.

What Did the VAone–Lattice Stack Demonstrate Off Long Beach Today?

The exercise ran four consecutive autonomy test scenarios, each testing a different layer of the autonomy stack:

• Standard autonomous navigation in open water
• Mid-mission task changes, requiring the vessel to reprioritize without remote re-programming
• Coordinated formation sailing with a second vessel, testing inter-vessel communication and coordination algorithms
• Emergency response to a simulated propulsion failure, requiring the ship to detect the casualty, adapt its configuration, and continue operating

About 40 witnesses attended from HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering (HD KSOE), Anduril Industries, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), the Republic of Korea Navy, and South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA). DAPA’s presence alongside the U.S. Navy is not ceremonial: DAPA is the Korean government’s primary defense procurement body, and its attendance with U.S. military officials signals bilateral institutional endorsement of the partnership for defense export purposes.

“This demonstration is significant because it confirmed the ability of an unmanned surface vessel to carry out complex missions and respond to a variety of operational situations that may arise after leaving port,” said Jang Kwang-pil, Executive VP at HD KSOE. “We will continue to develop and refine our technologies to secure a leading position in the unmanned surface vessel market.”

How Does the VAone–Lattice Stack Actually Work?

The stack has two distinct layers that divide responsibility between ship-level functions and mission-level functions.

VAone — the name stands for “Vessel Autonomy-No.1 & Only1” — is HD KSOE’s total-ship autonomy solution, built on HiNAS Prime, the high-capability navigation platform developed by Avikus, HD Hyundai’s autonomous navigation subsidiary. It operates in four integrated layers:

Navigation layer (HiNAS Control): Handles route planning, collision avoidance, and compliance with COLREGs maritime collision regulations — the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, the 41-rule international standard enforced by flag-state administrations including the U.S. Coast Guard. This layer received DNV Type Approval certification from DNV, the Norwegian classification society, in April 2026, making HiNAS Control the first mass-produced autonomous navigation support system certified for use across multiple vessel types without additional per-installation verification. More than 500 HD Hyundai-built vessels were already running HiNAS Control as standard equipment at the time of certification.

Machinery management layer: Continuously monitors the ship’s propulsion, power, and auxiliary systems; detects anomalies; and triggers corrective responses without crew input. This is the layer that handled the simulated propulsion failure in today’s exercise — identifying the casualty, adapting the propulsion configuration, and continuing operations.

Damage control layer: Identifies hull or system damage and initiates responsive action. Where navigation autonomy asks “where am I going,” damage control autonomy asks “what just broke and what do I do about it.”

Weapons autonomy layer: Described in HD KSOE’s architecture documentation; not demonstrated publicly in today’s exercise.

Lattice, Anduril’s AI mission autonomy platform, sits above the ship-level functions that VAone handles. Lattice handles mission planning, execution, and cross-platform coordination — it is hardware-agnostic and has already been fielded on Ghost Shark Royal Australian Navy extra-large autonomous underwater vehicles, on the Roadrunner interceptor, and on counter-drone systems deployed by U.S. Special Operations Command. Placing a 368-metric-ton (406 US short-ton) surface vessel on the same Lattice mesh means, in principle, that a single operator could coordinate surface, subsurface, and aerial autonomous assets through a common interface — a multi-domain command architecture rather than a collection of separately managed systems.

The division of responsibility is architecturally deliberate: VAone keeps the ship alive and operating; Lattice decides what mission it executes and how it coordinates with other platforms.

Machinery Management and Damage Control: What Navigation-Only Autonomy Leaves Out

The Navy’s Phase I Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) marketplace evaluated seven MUSV Phase I participants — Galliano Marine Services (affiliated with Edison Chouest Offshore), HII, Saronic, Sea Machines, PacMar Technology, Birdon America, and Leidos — on a defined set of performance criteria: 2,500 nautical miles of range at 25 knots in sea state 4, a 55,000-pound (25-metric-ton) payload in two standard containers, and autonomous navigation demonstrated over a 26-hour test sequence.

That performance standard is essentially a navigation and endurance test. It confirms that a vessel can cover distance, stay on course, and avoid collisions without a crew — all of which belong to the COLREGs-compliance layer that prior autonomous warship coverage identified as the autonomous vessel program’s primary benchmark.

What it does not address is what happens when something breaks at sea. A crewed warship devotes substantial personnel and procedures to three continuous functions: navigation (where we are going), engineering (keeping the ship running), and damage control (keeping the ship alive when something fails or is hit). A vessel that passes COLREGs testing has demonstrated one of those three. The VAone–Lattice stack demonstrated today addresses all three — or at least the first two definitively, with the third (damage control) exercised through a simulated casualty scenario in today’s test.

The competitive distinction is direct: the Phase I fleet can navigate. The VAone–Lattice stack navigates, monitors its own machinery, and responds to equipment failures.

HD Hyundai and Anduril Skipped Phase I — Their Demo Targets the Phase II Marketplace

HD Hyundai and Anduril were not among the seven Phase I companies selected for Phase I of the Navy’s MUSV program. When the Navy announced its Phase I participants in May 2026, Anduril — which had submitted a bid for the program in partnership with Edison Chouest in April — was not on the list. Edison Chouest itself competed separately under its Galliano Marine Services affiliate, without Anduril, and was selected.

A note on program history: the draft article and some earlier coverage referred to this program as the “Modular Attack Surface Craft (MASC)” program. MASC was canceled in March 2026 and replaced by the MUSV marketplace — a rolling acquisition structure that allows new entrants to qualify for Phase II after Phase I testing concludes. Phase I testing ran from June through October 2026.

Today’s Long Beach demonstration lands precisely as Phase I testing closes. That timing is not incidental. The Navy’s MUSV Phase II is a rolling marketplace designed to admit additional vendors who demonstrate operational capability after the initial cohort. HD Hyundai and Anduril are building their Phase II credential with today’s exercise — demonstrating to the same U.S. Navy officials who oversee the program that their stack is not only operational but goes beyond what Phase I required.

The vessels HD Hyundai is building for the program are larger than the test hull used today. The production platform under construction at HD Hyundai’s Ulsan shipyard is approximately 60 meters (197 feet) long and displaces more than 500 metric tons (551 US short tons), compared to the modified former Navy vessel used in today’s demonstration. Edison Chouest — Anduril’s designated U.S. manufacturing partner for production — competed in Phase I independently through Galliano Marine Services. That creates a notable structural situation: Anduril’s production shipyard partner has already demonstrated Phase I compliance under a different arrangement.

Anduril has invested heavily in the maritime surface position. The company completed a $5 billion Series H raise in May 2026 at a $61 billion (USD) valuation, and in March 2026 secured a $20 billion Army Lattice contract ceiling contract with the U.S. Army that confirmed Lattice — not just Anduril’s hardware — as a program-of-record acquisition target. If the software layer is already a government acquisition target in land and aerial domains, the argument for fielding it in the maritime surface domain follows directly.

From DNV Type Approval to US Waters: VAone’s Commercial Regulatory Foundation

One of the understated competitive advantages in today’s demonstration is the regulatory pedigree behind VAone’s navigation layer.

HiNAS Control, the COLREGs-compliant navigation component at the base of the VAone stack, received DNV Type Approval in April 2026. Type Approval from a major classification society means the system has been evaluated against published technical standards and certified for commercial maritime use across vessel types — not just on a single prototype installation. More than 500 HD Hyundai-built commercial vessels were already running HiNAS Control as standard equipment when the certification was issued.

Classification societies like DNV and ABS exist as third-party technical standards bodies; their approvals travel with the technology into new markets and regulatory environments in a way that purely military-track development processes do not. A U.S. Navy program evaluating autonomous navigation systems can look at HiNAS Control’s DNV Type Approval as evidence that the system has been evaluated by an independent technical body — not just demonstrated in a controlled exercise.

ABS, which is the American Bureau of Shipping and one of the major classification societies for U.S.-flagged vessels, signed a memorandum with HD Hyundai and Anduril at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition in April 2026 to collaborate on vessel design, production, autonomy systems, and classification standards. ABS officials attended today’s Long Beach demonstration. The pattern — classification society embedded in the program from the outset rather than engaged post-hoc — reduces certification risk as the production vessels move toward delivery.

The HD Hyundai–Anduril partnership itself moved on an accelerated timeline by defense-industry standards. The two companies expanded an initial commercial cooperation agreement in August 2025 to cover the Korean domestic defense market and Anduril’s U.S. platforms, then formalized a November 2025 design supply contract. Critical design review completed in April 2026, and production began at the Ulsan shipyard the same month. Today’s demonstration is the first time the integrated stack has run on an operational-scale vessel in American waters.

What Three and a Half Hours Off Long Beach Didn’t Prove

The exercise confirmed that the VAone–Lattice stack can navigate, manage a formation, adapt to mid-mission task changes, and handle a propulsion casualty on a 368-metric-ton (406 US short-ton) vessel in open water with institutional observers watching. Those are meaningful demonstrations that go beyond what Phase I required of its participants.

Three capability areas were not publicly demonstrated, and each matters for combat-relevant autonomous surface vessel evaluation:

GPS-denied operation. All documented maritime autonomous systems, including the Phase I fleet, have operated primarily in GPS-available environments. The harder engineering problem — maintaining navigation and position accuracy under GPS jamming or spoofing, a standard adversary capability in contested environments — remains undisclosed for the VAone–Lattice stack. The IMO MASS regulatory scoping exercise on Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships identifies GPS dependency as one of the core unresolved challenges for autonomous vessels in contested or congested waters.

Communications resilience under degradation. Lattice’s cross-domain coordination architecture depends on network connectivity to function as described. The August 2025 Starlink outage that stranded approximately 24 drone boats during a U.S. Navy exercise demonstrated that communications-dependent autonomy introduces a category of failure that crewed vessels do not share. Today’s exercise did not include a communications-degraded scenario in published reporting.

Combat survivability. A simulated propulsion failure is not a combat casualty scenario. Blast overpressure, near-miss mine detonation, and fire suppression under weapons-system engagement are materially different from the propulsion-anomaly scenario demonstrated today. The damage control layer of VAone was exercised under a benign-failure condition; its behavior under combat-damage conditions has not been publicly demonstrated.

These are not disqualifying gaps — no autonomous surface vessel program has publicly demonstrated all three, and Phase I did not require them. But they are the capability dimensions that will determine whether the MUSV fleet can operate in the environments for which it is nominally being built.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between navigation autonomy and full-ship autonomy?

Navigation autonomy covers route planning, obstacle avoidance, and compliance with the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs) — keeping the ship on course and out of trouble with other vessels. Full-ship autonomy adds two additional layers that a crewed warship handles continuously: machinery management (monitoring and correcting equipment anomalies without crew input) and damage control (identifying and responding to hull or systems damage). Most autonomous surface vessels that have publicly demonstrated capability — including the Phase I MUSV participants — have focused on navigation autonomy. The VAone platform adds the machinery and damage control layers on top of the navigation foundation.

Is HD Hyundai and Anduril competing for the Navy’s MUSV program?

They are targeting the MUSV Phase II marketplace, which is a rolling acquisition that opens to new entrants after Phase I testing concludes. HD Hyundai and Anduril were not among the seven Phase I participants selected for Phase I testing (which ran June through October 2026). The seven Phase I participants were Galliano Marine Services, HII, Saronic, Sea Machines, PacMar Technology, Birdon America, and Leidos. The Long Beach demonstration today is the HD Hyundai–Anduril team’s Phase II credential demonstration, timed precisely as Phase I testing wraps.

What is Anduril’s Lattice OS and why does it matter for a surface vessel?

Lattice is Anduril’s AI-powered mission autonomy and command-and-control platform. Unlike the ship-level functions VAone handles (keeping the vessel running and navigating), Lattice handles mission planning, task execution, and coordination across platforms — surface vessels, submarines, and aerial systems can in principle operate under a common command interface if they all run Lattice. Lattice has already been fielded on Ghost Shark for Australia’s Navy and on counter-drone systems for U.S. Special Operations Command, which means the software layer the surface vessel runs has an established track record in operational military programs.

What does DNV Type Approval for HiNAS Control mean, and why does it matter for a military program?

DNV is the Norwegian classification society — one of the major independent technical standards bodies for maritime vessels globally. Type Approval means the system has been evaluated against published standards and certified for commercial use across multiple vessel types, not just a single prototype. HiNAS Control, the navigation layer at the base of VAone, received DNV approval in April 2026 and is already installed on more than 500 commercial vessels. For a military program evaluating autonomous navigation systems, the commercial Type Approval provides independent third-party verification of the system’s technical standards compliance — evidence that doesn’t come with purely military-track developments that are evaluated only in controlled demonstration conditions.