First eyes in the water,
before the diver goes down.
SepcoTech represents Blueye Robotics — the Norwegian builder of portable, professional underwater drones already in service with allied navies and coast guards. Led by the X7 heavy-payload flagship and the AI-equipped X3 Ultra, the platform puts rapid underwater situational awareness in the hands of the team on scene — one operator, in the water in under a minute, eyes on the target before anyone gets wet.
When you need to look under the water — fast, and without a diver.
A suspicious package against a hull. A body in a harbour. A cut cable on the seabed. A wreck to identify. In every case the first question is the same — what is actually down there? — and the slowest, most dangerous way to answer it is to put a diver in the water blind. Blueye drones give the team a fast, repeatable first look: a portable ROV that one operator carries to the water's edge, deploys in under a minute, and flies to the target while everyone stays safe topside. The diver only enters once the picture is clear.
Two drones, one operating doctrine
A deliberately small fleet chosen for defence work: the X7 heavy-payload flagship for the demanding, deep, sensor-heavy tasks, and the X3 Ultra — a single-person, AI-equipped 4K drone — as the fast, everyday first-look tool. Both share the same rugged controller, the same tether-and-case logistics and the same Blunux operating system, so a team trained on one is trained on both.
Blueye X7
The flagship. Seven thrusters give full six-degree-of-freedom control for holding station in current and flying precise inspection lines, while seven guest ports and 10,000 lumens of light let the X7 carry a full sensor stack — multibeam sonar, DVL navigation, manipulator and positioning — on a single dive to 500 metres. This is the platform for MCM support, deep contact identification and critical-infrastructure survey.
- Operating depth500 m
- Thrusters7 · full 6-DoF
- Camera4K UHD · tilt · 8× zoom
- Lighting10,000 lm
- Guest ports7 (payload-ready)
- Onboard AIJetson Orin NX
Blueye X3 Ultra
The fast mover. Under 9 kg, carried and launched by one operator, the X3 Ultra streams 4K UHD with 8× zoom and runs onboard AI to detect and track objects of interest in the live feed. It is the drone a patrol boat, harbour-police unit or dive team keeps ready to put eyes on a hull, a contact or a scene in seconds — with three guest ports for sonar and navigation when the water turns dark.
- Operating depth305 m
- Weight8.6 kg · 1 operator
- Camera4K UHD · HDR · 8× zoom
- Thrusters4 × 350 W
- Guest ports3 (payload-ready)
- Onboard AIJetson Orin NX
Both platforms accept the same third-party payload ecosystem — Oculus & Gemini multibeam sonar, Water Linked DVL and USBL positioning, and Reach / Newton manipulators — through Blueye's plug-and-play Smart Connector. Full technical specifications provided on request.
One portable platform, five operational jobs.
The same drone moves between missions as the day demands — threat investigation in the morning, infrastructure patrol in the afternoon, search and recovery at night.
Pre-Dive Situational Awareness
Fly the target first. Hull inspections, pier and quay sweeps and threat searches are run from the surface, so the dive team enters the water already knowing the layout, the hazard and the task — not discovering it at depth.
Harbour & Hull Security
Routine inspection of ships' hulls, sea chests, harbour walls and anchorages — checking for limpet devices, contraband, tampering or damage. Repeatable enough to build a baseline and spot what has changed.
Critical Underwater Infrastructure
Surveillance of subsea cables, pipelines, power lines and wind-farm foundations — locating anomalies, confirming contacts and assessing damage on assets that a single act of sabotage can take offline.
Search, Recovery & Forensics
For police and search-and-rescue: locating bodies, weapons, evidence and lost equipment, and documenting an underwater crime or accident scene on video before — or instead of — sending a diver into low-visibility water.
Mine Counter-Measures Support
As a low-cost, expendable first-look tool, the drone re-acquires and images contacts ahead of EOD and clearance divers — a diver-replacement for the riskiest part of the identification step, used in service by navy mine-clearance teams.
How a Blueye task runs
A four-step cycle a two-person team can run from a quay, a RHIB or a coastline — no crane, no dive boat, no support vessel.
Deploy
Lift the drone from its transport case, clip the tether to the rugged controller and lower it in. One operator, in the water in under a minute, from almost any waterline.
Fly
Fly to the target on stable, auto-heading control while a 4K tiltable camera and lights stream live to the controller — and to a laptop or remote viewer for the supervisor and analysts.
Assess
Sonar finds the contact in poor visibility; camera and lights classify it. Record everything — video, position and depth — as evidence or a survey baseline.
Decide
Hand the team a clear picture: send the diver in to the exact spot, task an EOD response, or close the contact out — without anyone having entered the water blind.
The whole system fits in a case you can carry
Drone, tether reel, rugged controller, spare batteries and surface unit pack into a Zarges transport case. There is no launch-and-recovery system to rig, no crane and no dedicated vessel — which is exactly why a patrol boat, a harbour-police unit or a rescue team can keep one aboard and have eyes in the water the moment they arrive on scene.
Hot-swap smart batteries keep the platform on task across a long shift, and the same kit works from a pier, a small boat or a riverbank. The result is a tool that responds at the speed of an incident, not the speed of a mobilised dive operation.
Discuss a deployment →See in the dark, hold position, prove what you found
A 4K UHD tiltable camera and high-output lighting handle the visual classification; an imaging sonar finds and tracks contacts when the water is too turbid to see anything at all. A Doppler velocity log and inertial navigation let the drone hold station and run repeatable lines, while a manipulator can recover small objects or attach a line.
The X7 carries up to seven guest ports — enough to run multibeam sonar, DVL positioning and a manipulator on a single dive — while the X3 Ultra offers three. Every dive is logged with synchronised video, heading, depth and position, the kind of record a court, an incident board or an intelligence cell can actually use, and onboard AI flags objects of interest in the live feed to keep the operator focused on the decision, not the screen.
Ask about payload fit →
The drone, working underwater
Footage published by Blueye Robotics — an X3 flying with a manipulator gripper fitted, the configuration used for search, recovery and light intervention tasks.
Proven on real underwater operations
Adopted into naval service, fielded on multi-nation infrastructure-security exercises, and taken deeper than any Blueye before — a record that spans the full security mission.
WWII aircraft wrecks, identified at 300+ metres
In Trondheimsfjorden, Norway, Blueye teams used two X3 drones — one fitted with an Oculus multibeam sonar and extra lights — to dive and identify two previously unknown WWII seaplane wrecks: a six-engine Blohm & Voss BV-222 at 318 m and a Heinkel HE-115 at 253 m. The contacts were first found with the Royal Norwegian Navy's minesweeper squadron, then confirmed visually by the portable ROVs. As Blueye noted, "one of the success factors for operating at such depths is keeping the boat steady" — the same precise station-keeping that matters on any deep contact.
Reported by Blueye Robotics
Guarding subsea infrastructure with a USV–ROV team
At the SeaSEC Challenge Weeks in May 2025 — run under the Northern Naval Capabilities Cooperation of six allied navies — Blueye fielded an X3 alongside uncrewed surface vessels, AUVs and seabed crawlers to defend critical underwater infrastructure. The model: uncrewed surface vessels autonomously scan wide areas for anomalies near cables and pipelines; the ROV then drops in to give live video confirmation of each contact. With the world's subsea cables spanning over 1.5 million km — and Nord Stream a reminder of the stakes — it is a blueprint for persistent seabed surveillance.
Reported by Blueye Robotics
Selected by the Royal Netherlands Navy
In August 2025 the Royal Netherlands Navy adopted the Blueye platform after a competitive international tender, contracted through partner RVI Tools. The drones support diving operations, engineer reconnaissance of channels, quays, bridges and locks, harbour protection, mine counter-measures and search & recovery. As CEO Christian Gabrielsen put it, the contract "demonstrates the global trust in the Blueye ROV platform."
Reported by Blueye Robotics
Standard kit across the Norwegian Coast Guard
Since 2022 the Norwegian Coast Guard has equipped its fleet with Blueye drones, using them for hull inspection, subsurface search and anti-narcotics boarding support. It is the kind of fleet-wide adoption that only follows when a tool proves itself repeatable and reliable in daily coast-guard operations — not a one-off trial, but standard equipment aboard the ships.
Reported by Blueye RoboticsBlueye X3 drones also captured the first public footage of the sabotaged Nord Stream 1 pipeline in 2022, and are in service with Norwegian Customs for below-waterline vessel inspection — a reminder of how quickly a portable ROV moves between infrastructure security, law enforcement and border control.
Case studies summarised from material published by Blueye Robotics. SepcoTech is an Authorised Distributor and is not the author of these operations.
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