Test of autonomous commercial ship may ease Army’s watercraft shortage

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — The Army is testing a commercial ship retrofitted with fully autonomous navigation that could help the service overcome its watercraft shortage.

HOS Resolution, a 257-foot-long supply ship, departed Pearl Harbor on Monday morning for an 18-hour trip to the Big Island in fully autonomous mode while in open sea. It will continue testing during a return trip Wednesday.

The vessel, equipped with a deployable ramp, is owned by Louisiana-based Hornbeck Offshore Services.

The proof-of-concept is being overseen by Army mariners with 8th Theater Sustainment Command, which is responsible for sustaining joint forces across the Indo-Pacific region, as well as moving Army equipment throughout the Hawaiian islands.

“The goal of this is to have a vessel of this size go into a contested environment and either dock or deploy the ramp from a remote location,” Chief Warrant Officer 2 Joshua Way, a watercraft systems master overseeing the test, said Monday.

In May, Sea Machines Robotics, based in Boston, spent nine days in Louisiana installing its “drop-in” SM300 autonomous command and control on the Resolution, said Tanner Stiker, who oversees the project for the company.

Technicians with Sea Machines Robotics monitor an autonomous navigation system installed on HOS Resolution from a command center at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Aug. 17, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

“Right now, we have the system installed on upwards of 230 different vessels — commercial, [Department of Defense], Coast Guard,” he said Monday at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam where he and Army mariners were monitoring the trip.

“I think Resolution is the largest boat that has ever been retrofitted with autonomy across the entire DOD, so this is kind of a novel new concept here. A lot of autonomous and unmanned surface vessels are at that smaller 20-foot to 12-foot size,” he said.

Way said many of the commercial vessels the command contracts are similar in size to the Resolution and could potentially be equipped with drop-in systems.

A “flyaway kit” like the SM300 that can be quickly installed on such ships would speed up the autonomy process as compared to waiting for companies to build autonomous vessels from scratch, he said.

Greater reliance on autonomous resupply vessels is a key part of the command’s five-pronged strategy for coping with the Army’s dearth of watercraft needed for sustainment operations in the Indo-Pacific.

The strategy also includes pulling prepositioned watercraft out of storage; using contractor-owned, contractor-operated watercraft to leverage capacity; training Army mariners on contracted vessels; and leveraging vessel capacity in host-nation countries such as Japan and Philippines.

The Army is trying to reverse its substantial divestiture of watercraft stock that took place over the past decade. Its fleet was trimmed by half over six years ending in May 2024, according to a report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in October 2024.

The supply ship HOS Resolution prepares to launch from a landing beach at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, Aug. 17, 2026, in a test of an autonomous navigation system. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

The Army’s fleet by that point had shrunk to 70 vessels from 134 in 2018, the office found.

The Resolution will remain fully crewed during the test, which also includes roll-on, roll-off loading of several Army vehicles.

Stiker said a planned second phase of testing would be automation of the ship’s engine room.

Such an autonomous system would use sensors and artificial intelligence to monitor and control a vessel’s machinery that controls fuel, cooling and propulsion.

“Phase three optimally would be starting to automate that stern ramp and whatnot, so we could do that completely remotely as well,” Stiker said. “But that’s still kind of in progress.”