A Chinese team has set a Guinness World Record for the most autonomous underwater vehicles operating simultaneously, deploying 116 of the small robots in a swimming pool test.
The trial involved a swarm of drones called TH-618s, the university said in a statement on 24 September.
The test took place on 29 August in a pool measuring 50m by 20m (164ft by 65ft), under the supervision of Guinness World Records officials, who have since certified and published the record.
The record was set by a team from Northwestern Polytechnical University, working with Xian Tianhe Maritime Technologies, a marine equipment and vehicle supplier and a subsidiary of the private defence contractor Xian Tianhe Defence Technology.
The vehicles were deployed in sequence and carried out autonomous underwater formation navigation with no human intervention for 34 minutes over a distance of 500m, following a preset route using real-time data.
"Enabling dozens or even hundreds of underwater vehicles to achieve fully autonomous, long-duration, and stable coordinated navigation in such an environment has always been a core challenge in the global field of underwater intelligent equipment," the university said in its statement.
"This time, the stable navigation of a cluster of hundreds of vehicles represents a breakthrough in the large-scale coordinated navigation of underwater unmanned systems."
The TH-618 vehicles are 61.5cm (24.2in) long and 20cm (7.8in) wide, weigh 5.14kg (11.33lb), and have a maximum range of 30km (18.6 miles) and a battery life of more than eight hours, the university said. They navigate using a mobile phone vision camera system and can adjust their route to correct for disturbances.
China has been rapidly advancing its autonomous vehicle technology, including drone swarms across land, air and sea, as militaries around the world shift away from crewed platforms towards uncrewed systems.
Ukraine said in December that it had carried out the first underwater drone strike on a submarine, hitting a Russian vessel docked in Novorossiysk, a port city on the Black Sea.
In July, researchers from Dalian Maritime University and the China Coast Guard Academy published a proposal for contested islands in the South China Sea to be defended by coordinated drone swarms, including underwater vehicles used to cover detection blind spots.
The paper was published in the Chinese-language journal Command Control & Simulation, which is supervised by the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation.
Underwater drone swarms have also been tested elsewhere, including a European Union-funded project involving 41 autonomous robots, according to the European Commission.
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