If you’ve been following our coverage of the Navy’s underwater drone problem, you’ve probably noticed the solutions keep getting bigger. A seabed fence stretching nearly a mile across a harbor floor. A 34-foot drone submarine that fires things out of itself while submerged. So I was not expecting the most interesting counter-drone machine of the summer to be something you could lose in a golf bag.

The machine is called the JaiaBot, and it comes out of Jaia Robotics, a small shop in Bristol, Rhode Island, founded in December 2020. Each one weighs 6.5 pounds (3 kilograms), runs 38 inches (96 centimeters) long, and has a hull 2.75 inches across. You launch it by throwing it off a dock or a boat.

That’s the whole procedure.

So what does a 6.5-pound drone actually do?

Mostly, it collects data fast and cheap. On the surface, a JaiaBot planes along at better than 7 knots (about 8 mph), which is quick for something this size, and there’s a reason it works that way. Pushing a hull across the surface costs far less energy than dragging it through the water below, so the bot sprints on top, stops where you want a measurement, dives straight down as deep as 197 feet (60 meters), takes its readings, and pops back up. Jaia rates the surface range at 7 miles (11 kilometers), and an extended-range version stretches that past 20 miles with up to 115 hours in the water. The software is open source, built on two robotics middlewares developed at MIT, and one operator can run a whole pod of them at once.

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