Happy Friday afternoon.
Leviathan's team would like to share some updates that occurred within the past month.
BLUF
- Supply chain relationships have been established across Taiwan and the U.S. East Coast.
- Validation prototypes for the AUV's GNC systems and biofilm-powered energy systems are built and in testing.
Tech Progress and Roadmap
Over the past several weeks, development focused heavily on subsystem validation and rapid iteration. Current developments include:
- Low-power underwater acoustic communication powered by triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs)
- Benthic microbial fuel cell (BMFC) power output validation and architecture testing
- Scaled underwater prototypes with closed-loop guidance, navigation, and control systems
Sonar System
Our underwater acoustic communication platform validates whether energy harvested from TENGs can support low-power underwater packet transmission.
At its core, the demo incorporates an STM32 board alongside a homemade TENG assembly using aluminum tape to generate measurable electrical output.
We aim to use this demo to prove that the harvested energy — which is in high-voltage, low-current form — is reliable for transmitting packets at viable intervals. Ongoing testing will allow us to quantize the interval at which communication can occur.
Our initial testing supports the hypothesis that larger integrated biofilm systems scale favorably with hull surface area. As vehicle size increases, available energy-harvesting area increases substantially as well.
BMFC & Power Architecture
Initial BMFC testing draws on microbes from lake-water sediment to validate long-duration power stability and energy output behavior over time. Culture growth is then monitored over the span of a month.
Concurrently, the team is mapping out the biological and chemical processes necessary to develop a pipeline analogous to drug discovery for BMFC cell culture optimization. Look out for an update on parallelized BMFC culture cultivation in the coming months.
Efficiently utilizing the BMFCs and TENGs across missions with extended timeframes demands a deliberately designed power architecture centered around separating long-duration energy harvesting from short-duration high-power discharge events.
The primary architecture under evaluation charges supercapacitors steadily using BMFC-generated energy, then rapidly discharges them to actuate control surfaces for guidance and navigation.
A second architecture dedicates 10C LTO L-25 cells for propulsion and rapid maneuvering events, while a lithium primary battery supports long-duration recharge capability.
Current work is focused on validating charge timing, discharge behavior, and full-vehicle operational timelines.
Guidance, Navigation, and Control
A 1/16-scale 3D-printed underwater prototype now serves as the testbed for validating hydrodynamics and controls algorithms.
Closed-loop underwater navigation is actively under testing, with the current control stack running baseline PID control architectures for their ease of in-water iteration.
We've printed multiple different geometries for our control surfaces to develop a scaling curve for power requirements, which directly defines the demands placed on our BMFC culture.
Experimental findings are being fed into a high-fidelity digital physics model, which will incorporate an LQR control architecture as development matures.
Look out for the June update for deeper breakdowns of onboard compute, embedded electronics, FPGA usage, and low-power underwater systems.
Government
This month, we held conversations with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) regarding the current acquisition environment for autonomous maritime systems.
One point became very clear: the government prefers complete operational packages rather than isolated subsystem technologies.
As a result, Leviathan's strategy is centered around vertically integrating the operational architecture rather than developing isolated point solutions.
Over the coming months, significant focus will be placed on partnerships, integration pathways, and CRADA-related opportunities.
Manufacturing & Supply Chain
Any hardware-focused company is ultimately limited by manufacturing capability.
Over the past several months, we have actively engaged manufacturers across multiple parts of the vehicle stack — ranging from Taiwanese electronics and battery suppliers to East Coast shipbuilders and composite manufacturers.
A major focus area for us in these engagements is ensuring NDAA compliance and long-term manufacturability.
Supplier selection is being evaluated not only on technical performance, but also on scalability, procurement stability, and future government deployment compatibility.
We are intentionally engaging vendors early so manufacturability constraints shape the architecture from the beginning rather than becoming bottlenecks later.
What's Next
The next several months will focus heavily on integration of our components.
We've validated subsystems in isolated settings and have a 3D-printed hull to test in the Schuylkill River. As we wrap up integration for our first small-scale prototype, it's time to start thinking about our first full-scale biofilm-powered prototype.
We have scoped out NAVSEA-certified manufacturers, a location to test, and industry-trusted part vendors that we plan to engage in a SpaceX fashion. We've run the numbers and know how much it will cost. Kicking off the raise soon.
– Leviathan