Rise of the robots: the revolution in naval warfare

The robotic revolution that transformed warfare in the skies will soon extend to the deep sea, with underwater spy "satellites", drone-launching pods on the ocean floor and unmanned ships hunting submarines.

Officials at the US military's research agency outlined new programmes this week that included a number of potentially groundbreaking technologies that could alter the way naval battles are fought, in the same way that robotic aircraft have altered warfare on land and in the air.

One proposed system involves robot pods on the ocean floor that could launch surveillance drones in the air or at sea or provide a communications link when American forces were facing electronic jamming, said Jared Adams, spokesman for Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).

"The motivation is to enable timely deployment of unmanned distributed systems to distant locations by pre-deploying the assets years in advance and then triggering their release for rapid effects at future times of our choosing," Adams said.

The programme has been dubbed "Upward Falling Payloads", or UFP. And officials said the robot pods floating to the water's surface to release various payloads could perform some roles now carried out by submarines, which are much more expensive to operate.

With America's technological edge shrinking, researchers are looking at how to create and build weapons quickly, instead of the drawn-out process that usually prevails at the Pentagon.

Darpa Deputy Director Steven Walker said the agency was "rethinking how we develop new military systems" to be more agile and "cost-effective".