Kraken KATFISH Launches Itself From Turkish Navy Drone Boat

Kraken Robotics just pulled off something navies have been trying to make practical for years. The Canadian firm integrated its KATFISH towed sonar onto Sefine’s RD-22 unmanned surface vessel off the coast of Istanbul, then launched and recovered the system from the moving USV with no humans in the loop, as Unmanned Systems Technology reported.

The trials ran in the first quarter of 2026. Several navies and government officials were on hand to watch. This is the second time in six months Kraken has bolted its mine-hunting package onto a foreign USV and made it work at sea.

What Actually Happened Off Istanbul

The demonstration paired Kraken’s KATFISH synthetic aperture sonar towfish with its autonomous launch and recovery system, both mounted on Sefine’s RD-22. Sefine SISAM, the Turkish shipyard’s unmanned systems research arm, handled the mission planning software and local integration.

KATFISH captured sonar imagery at 3 cm by 3 cm resolution across a swath of 200 meters per side, which works out to roughly 656 feet per side or about 1,312 feet of total coverage.

That data was live-streamed to a shore-based command center, where operators classified contacts in real time. The focus was rapid detection and identification of mine-like objects and critical underwater infrastructure.

Bernard Mills, Kraken’s Executive Vice President of Defence, framed the event around maritime transit route security. The subtext is Istanbul, Turkish waters, and the Black Sea.

The KATFISH and the RD-22

KATFISH is a high-speed, actively stabilized towed sonar that operates at up to 10 knots, or roughly 11.5 mph. The towfish is 17.5 feet long with a 6-inch diameter, and its “eye” section measures about 15 inches by 35 inches.

The system produces real-time synthetic aperture sonar imagery at constant 3 cm resolution out to 200 meters per side, with simultaneous 3D bathymetry. Area coverage rates reach 3.5 square kilometers per hour, or about 1.35 square miles per hour. That is several times faster than traditional sidescan sonar with sharper resolution.

The RD-22 is part of Sefine’s Constellation-class USV family, a multi-role platform that the shipyard has been developing since 2021 in partnership with Aselsan. The class was built for anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and electronic warfare depending on the payload loadout.

Sefine has not publicly released a full spec sheet for the RD-22 specifically, but the Constellation hulls are roughly 50 feet long and capable of over 40 mph, with ranges exceeding 400 nautical miles.

The key hardware point is that KATFISH and its LARS were designed to integrate with small vessels and to be hardware-agnostic across USV platforms. The all-titanium LARS construction keeps the magnetic signature and weight low enough for vessels like the RD-22 to carry it without compromising sea-keeping.

Why the Black Sea

The Russia-Ukraine war turned the Black Sea into a mine-contaminated body of water. Thousands of Russian naval mines laid near Odesa drifted south, some reaching Turkish waters where Turkish mine countermeasures units are already neutralizing them. Civilian ships have struck these floating mines. Neighboring NATO navies have had near-misses.

Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria formalized the Black Sea Mine Countermeasures Task Group in January 2024 to coordinate clearance operations. Turkey has 11 mine countermeasures vessels, one of the most capable MCM forces in NATO, and Ankara has positioned itself as the lead on post-war Black Sea demining.

Under the Montreux Convention, non-Black Sea NATO navies cannot operate freely in those waters, which makes Turkish MCM capability the keystone of any regional clearance plan.

That is the strategic context Kraken is selling into. A Canadian SAS system that can be bolted onto a Turkish-built drone boat, launched and recovered without a crew, and stream classified contacts to shore in real time is exactly the kind of tool Turkish MCM planners are looking for. Every hour a USV spends near a suspected mine is an hour a sailor on a manned minehunter does not.

Part of a Broader Kraken Push

The November 2025 demo with Atlas UK, using the same KATFISH and LARS on a Royal Navy 11-meter ARCIMS USV, was the proof of concept. The ARCIMS integration happened in just two weeks and survived Sea State 3 conditions. Kraken and Atlas positioned it as the first air-deployable, 300-meter depth-rated autonomous towed SAS survey system in the industry.

The Istanbul demo takes the same package and ports it to a different hull in a different navy’s procurement ecosystem. That is the business model. Kraken is not trying to build USVs. It is trying to be the sonar and autonomous LARS that every NATO navy buys regardless of which shipyard they source their drone boats from.

For a company whose KATFISH product debuted nearly eight years ago, this is a smart way to scale. The hardware is mature. The software is mature. Finding more hulls to mount it on is the growth lever.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant about this demo. The mine countermeasure problem in the Black Sea is not theoretical. Real ships have been hit by real Russian mines that drifted hundreds of miles from where they were laid. Civilians have died. And the Montreux Convention means most NATO navies cannot help directly.

So the question becomes: how do you give Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria the tools to clear a body of water the size of California without losing sailors to the mines they are trying to find?

The answer is exactly what Kraken and Sefine showed off Istanbul. An unmanned boat drops a towed sonar, sweeps a swath of seabed at 3-centimeter resolution, streams the data back to a command center on shore, and recovers the sonar without a human on deck.

No sailor is within a thousand feet of a suspected mine at any point. That is the operational picture modern MCM should look like, and the fact that two weeks of integration work can port this capability onto a different shipyard’s hull is the part that should make NATO planners pay attention.

The soft spot is that a press release demo is not a contract, and a Q1 2026 trial with “several navies” watching is not the same as Turkey, Romania, or Bulgaria actually writing a purchase order. Kraken still needs someone to commit money. But the technical case is about as clean as these things get in the unmanned MCM space right now.

Photo credit: Kraken