Overview
- A team from Northwestern Polytechnical University and Xian Tianhe Maritime Technologies ran 116 TH-618 autonomous underwater vehicles in a supervised pool test that Guinness World Records certified after officials reviewed the demonstration.
- The trial, conducted on 29 August, had the vehicles navigate a preset 500m route for 34 minutes with no human control as units corrected their position using onboard visual navigation and real-time data.
- Each TH-618 is about 61.5 cm long, weighs roughly 5.14 kg, claims a range up to 30 km and more than eight hours of battery life, and uses a mobile-phone camera system to sense and correct for disturbances.
- The test took place in a controlled 50m by 20m pool under official supervision and does not by itself show battlefield use or performance in open-ocean conditions with stronger currents and longer-range communications needs.
- The result builds on wider Chinese research into coordinated maritime drone use and follows international work on underwater swarms, raising questions about future uses for seabed mapping, infrastructure inspection, maritime surveillance, and area-denial missions.