The Royal Navy has taken delivery of its second remotely controlled mine-hunting vessel.
Developed by French defence firm Thales, Adventure has been delivered to the Royal Navy’s base in Plymouth. It will now join its sister vessel Ariadne, which entered service in March 2025.
This is the second vessel in the Maritime Mine Counter Measures (MMCM) programme, a joint UK-French initiative to assess and develop autonomous uncrewed naval systems that utilise sonar and AI to detect, classify and destroy naval mines remotely. Led by OCCAR (Organisation conjointe de coopération en matière d’armement/Organisation for Joint Armament Co-operation) with Thales, the programme aims to replace legacy mine counter-measure vessels with uncrewed systems such as Adventure.
A video of the MMCM sea trials is shown below.
According to the Royal Navy, Adventure will serve as a ‘primary system’, deploying and coordinating other smaller autonomous tools to survey the sea floor and destroy mines. For instance, Thales...