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TAIPEI, Taiwan — Shield AI and Thunder Tiger Corp., announced the successful completion of Hivemind’s first multi-asset autonomous teaming demonstration on water, validating Shield AI’s Hivemind AI pilot aboard Thunder Tiger SeaShark unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in a coordinated mission on July 29, 2026.
During the demonstration in Pingtung, Taiwan, Thunder Tiger’s SeaShark 600 and SeaShark 800 USVs equipped with Hivemind autonomously executed a coordinated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) mission using maritime radar, imagery, and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. Hivemind autonomously planned mission waypoints, searched a designated maritime area, identified a target vessel of interest, and coordinated the USVs to escort the vessel out of the designated search zone. This demonstration marks Hivemind’s first multi-asset autonomous teaming demonstration on water and Hivemind’s first maritime radar and AIS integration.
“Hivemind continues to prove that true mission autonomy can scale across domains, platforms, and functional assets, unlocking new capabilities for distributed intelligence and maritime security missions,” said Nathan Michael, chief technology officer at Shield AI. “As we continue working with Thunder Tiger to expand the scale and sophistication of autonomous maritime teams, these systems will fundamentally reshape maritime surveillance operations and strengthen deterrence through resilient, intelligent operations.”
Earlier this year, Shield AI and Thunder Tiger announced a strategic partnership to explore integrating the Hivemind AI pilot with Thunder Tiger’s unmanned systems portfolio, supporting autonomous dual‑use maritime missions. Thunder Tiger’s portfolio spans surface and aerial systems, including Blue UAS‑approved first‑person view (FPV) platforms that strengthen secure and resilient supply chains for US and allied defense applications. Building on the success of this demonstration, the companies are continuing to collaborate on additional opportunities that leverage Thunder Tiger’s broad unmanned portfolio and Shield AI’s autonomy technologies, including potential future sensor integrations, advanced autonomous behaviours, larger team operations, and open‑ocean use cases.
“As an island nation, the maritime domain is increasingly critical to Taiwan’s security. By integrating AI pilots into our portfolio, we can enable distributed, networked teams that coordinate dynamically to build a more complete understanding of the maritime environment – improving the ability to detect, classify, and identify contacts while helping operators respond with greater speed, scale, and effectiveness,” said Gene Su, board director and general manager of Thunder Tiger Corp. “This demonstration marks an important step forward in advancing resilient, autonomous maritime capabilities, and we expect our partnership with Shield AI to continue delivering increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems that strengthen Taiwan’s defense posture.”
The Hivemind AI pilot enables platforms to sense, decide, and act independently, without human intervention. Hivemind has already piloted more than 30 different platforms including F-16s, jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), helicopters, drone boats, and ground vehicles.
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai.
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