How Uncrewed Systems Can Help Secure Canada’s Borders

Canada’s maritime security challenge is defined by its large geographic expanse.

As the country with the world’s longest coastline and an Exclusive Economic Zone spanning 5.6 million square kilometers, Canada faces an immense operational task: maintaining awareness across vast and often remote waters. From the Arctic to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Great Lakes, Canada’s maritime domain underpins national sovereignty, economic resilience, environmental protection, and public safety.

Yet the marine operational environment is complex and challenging, and becoming more so.

Maritime traffic is increasing. Arctic access is expanding as sea ice coverage diminishes, and timing changes. Critical infrastructure is facing new vulnerabilities, and governments are being asked to monitor larger areas with finite personnel and operating budgets. Traditional maritime surveillance methods remain essential, but crewed ships and aircraft alone cannot realistically provide continuous coverage across such a large and dynamic maritime region.

Canada’s future maritime security architecture will require a different approach. One built not only on conventional assets, but also on persistent autonomous systems capable of extending operational reach, filling surveillance gaps, and maintaining continuous awareness across remote areas.

This is where uncrewed surface vehicles are becoming increasingly important.

At Open Ocean Robotics, we have focused on developing autonomous surface vessels designed specifically for long duration maritime monitoring without onboard crew or fuel. Our solar-powered DataXplorer™ platform was created around a simple but increasingly important idea: persistence matters.

Traditional patrols provide snapshots in time, but autonomous systems can remain on station for weeks or months, continuously collecting and transmitting information. This creates a fundamentally different operating model for maritime awareness. Rather than relying exclusively on intermittent deployments of crewed assets, distributed autonomous systems can maintain ongoing visibility across areas that are otherwise difficult and expensive to monitor continuously.

That persistence has significant implications for border security and maritime awareness.

Many maritime threats and enforcement challenges occur in remote regions or outside regular patrol windows. Illegal fishing activity, suspicious vessel movements, environmental hazards, and infrastructure threats often depend on gaps in traditional visibility periods. Autonomous systems help reduce those gaps by providing continuous observation, real time data collection, and early detection capability.

Modern uncrewed systems are also evolving into intelligent sensing platforms rather than simply remotely operated vehicles. Advances in onboard processing and artificial intelligence now allow autonomous systems to identify, classify, and track vessels in real time using video cameras, including infrared, and acoustic sensors.

On our DataXplorer platform, AI-enabled systems combine imaging with acoustic and other monitoring sensors to support threat detection, tracking, and classification. These systems can help identify non-AIS transmitting vessels as well as underwater acoustic activity, improving awareness in environments where traditional monitoring methods may have limited visibility.

This evolution toward distributed intelligent sensing networks is particularly important for a country like Canada.

A small number of large, crewed assets cannot maintain constant presence everywhere at once, but a large number of small, remote and autonomous systems can expand coverage, improve detection capability, and support more informed operational decision making. Autonomous systems also provide an important force multiplier for conventional maritime assets by allowing crewed vessels and aircraft to focus on higher priority response and enforcement operations.

As northern activity continues to increase, these capabilities will become increasingly important in the Arctic. Maintaining awareness in remote maritime regions is essential to both sovereignty and security, yet Arctic operations remain expensive and logistically challenging. Autonomous systems offer an opportunity to extend monitoring capability while reducing the need for continuous crewed operations in difficult environments.

At Open Ocean Robotics, we are actively advancing Arctic-hardening initiatives and working alongside Indigenous communities as part of broader Canadian maritime monitoring efforts. These collaborations recognize that long term maritime awareness in the North will require technologies that are resilient, adaptable, and capable of operating with limited infrastructure.

Autonomous maritime systems are no longer experimental concepts. Over the past several years, they have matured rapidly into operational tools used by governments, researchers, and industry. Open Ocean Robotics systems have accumulated more than 5,500 operational hours across three ocean basins and have supported applications ranging from maritime domain awareness and fisheries enforcement to port monitoring and offshore environmental operations. Our systems have operated in collaboration with navies, research organizations, and enforcement agencies in a range of challenging maritime environments. We have supported operations focused on illegal fishing enforcement, coastal situational awareness, offshore monitoring, and long duration autonomous deployments. These deployments demonstrate an important shift from experimental technologies to operational infrastructure that is underway in maritime operations.

Canada’s future maritime security architecture will require an integrated approach combining crewed vessels, autonomous systems, distributed sensors, artificial intelligence, and real time communications. Uncrewed systems offer a scalable and cost-effective way to strengthen maritime awareness, improve border security, and reinforce sovereignty across one of the largest and most complex maritime regions in the world.

In an era of increasing geopolitical uncertainty and growing pressure on maritime infrastructure, persistent awareness is becoming a core component of national resilience. The countries that succeed in maritime security over the coming decades will be those that can maintain continuous awareness across vast ocean spaces while adapting quickly to changing operational demands.