Overview
- Thales took 76Nano from concept to prototype in 10 months, drawing on Sonar 2076 heritage and UK content including a transmit element from Neptune Sonar.
- The platform-agnostic tile design scales from uncrewed vehicles to seabed nodes, using 75 cm receive tiles and a 40 cm transmit tile that can be arranged in arrays of up to 48 panels.
- Capabilities span passive and active anti-submarine sensing, medium-frequency synthetic-aperture seabed mapping for infrastructure protection, and narrow-beam subsea communications.
- Embedded Cortex AI performs edge processing to classify contacts, prioritize alerts and compress outputs for constrained acoustic links, with full datasets retained for post-mission analysis.
- Thales reports positive in-water testing and will show the prototype at a Royal Navy technology event on December 17, with further trials and potential integration into UK and NATO distributed sensing programs; no procurement decision has been announced.