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In August, Sofar Ocean demonstrated real-time maritime domain awareness at BlueTIDE 2026, a Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Newport-hosted event that brought industry partners together to test undersea and surface technologies in realistic port and harbor security scenarios.
At BlueTIDE, Sofar Ocean deployed an array of Spotter platforms in an operationally relevant undersea warfare environment. Spotter Sound and Spotter Current+Salinity+Water Level systems delivered undersea acoustic and environmental data in real time.
The Spotter Sound systems, complemented by Sofar’s Sentrix intelligence layer, detected and classified unmanned underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, unmanned surface vessels, small boats, and divers. Detection data was integrated into the Undersea Warfare Decision Support System (USW-DSS), ATAK, and Topside Command and Control (C2) platform for fusion with other data sources, enabling rapid decision making.
The event successfully demonstrated that Sentrix transforms distributed passive acoustic collections into actionable detections for undersea domain awareness and port and harbor security.
The Sentrix approach provides broad geographic coverage with a distributed network of cost-effective, AI-enabled hydrophones that detect and classify acoustic events on the edge. This allows non-expert operators and decision makers to understand what is happening across a large underwater region in real time, while keeping deployment and maintenance simple.
Sentrix is built on the Spotter Platform, a compact, expeditionary maritime surface and subsurface sensing platform. Each Spotter consists of a solar-powered Spotter buoy, a Smart Mooring cable, and modular Bristlemouth open-source sensor nodes. Systems are lightweight and rapidly deployable with over-the-air update capabilities: They can be deployed from a small boat without specialized vessels or crews, and stay in the field for months without the need for battery swaps or other maintenance. Data transmits in real time to the Spotter Dashboard or through an API, and nodes can be combined with other Spotter systems to cover a larger area. Updates to the system’s acoustic detection algorithms can be made over-the-air, allowing rapid and easy adaptation to evolving threats.
Spotter’s modular nature enables partners to easily integrate their own sensors and other payloads. Throughout the BlueTIDE event, a NUWC partner integrated their own, government-developed sensor payload with a Spotter, and an industry partner demonstrated its Bristlemouth-integrated undersea communications payload. Because Bristlemouth is an open-source standard, new capabilities connect to any Bristlemouth platform – including existing Spotter infrastructure – instead of always needing a custom built system.
BlueTIDE showcased the value of combining two types of data from the Spotter Platform: persistent passive acoustic sensing, and real-time environmental observations.
Environmental data informs the acoustic information. It allows for an enhanced understanding of the speed of sound through the water column while also giving insight into the background noise levels, informing detection algorithms and helping operators interpret and contextualize detection events (e.g., explanations for sounds that could be attributed to waves and winds). Absent this environmental information, acoustic data is more susceptible to misinterpretation.
BlueTIDE demonstrated that Sentrix turns distributed acoustic collections into actionable detections and integrates with decision making platforms. The event also showcased how Spotter’s expeditionary nature and ease of deployment enables rapid establishment of a security perimeter. Sentrix supports a wide range of missions including undersea domain awareness and port and harbor security.
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