Swedes Have Built a Drone That Has Never Been Seen Before

 

“Swedish manufacturers have just tested an unmanned ship that flies over water. Last week, Aston Harald Composite successfully completed the first test flight of its GhostFoiler unmanned hydrofoil in Stockholm waters, maneuvering between ferries and pleasure boats in the city’s archipelago. The company said the ship performed well – considering it was its first test. “A first flight is always special,” the company says. “After solving the usual grounding and shielding problems, the test went according to plan, and soon we were flying between ferries and pleasure boats in the Stockholm archipelago. The ship flew perfectly!”

 

Hydrofoils themselves are nothing new. Hydrofoils have been around for more than a century – they use the same principle of lift that keeps an airplane in the air, only it is applied to water, not air. The GhostFoiler stands out because it is completely autonomous. The craft must sense the water’s surface, its altitude above it, and constantly adjust to stay stable—all without a human balancing on the deck, as a hydrofoil pilot would. This is a much more complex control task than simply keeping the hull afloat—and is why the development of hydrofoil drones has lagged behind that of conventional drone ships.

 

GhostFoiler technology traces its origins back nearly two decades—it all began as a student project at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In 2008, naval architecture professor Jakob Kuttenkeuler led a team of 15 students to build one of the first electric hydrofoils ever built, called the Evolo. It is widely recognized as one of the first electric hydrofoils ever built—and the forerunner of today’s eFoil boards, now commercially available worldwide. Kuttenkeuler continued this research at KTH’s Marine Robotics Group, developing Evolo into an experimental hydrofoil testbed for autonomous control systems, sensor integration and navigation. This academic work was commercialized and christened EvoloFoil: the project developed the hydrofoil hardware and flight control system now used in the GhostFoiler model.

 

The hydrofoil is powered by two 10-kilowatt electric outboard motors manufactured by the Swedish company Zparq AB, which are described as extremely quiet – a useful feature for a vessel that could eventually be used for reconnaissance or surveillance tasks. The demonstrator is currently en route to Portugal, where it will serve as part of the Swedish team in NATO’s REPMUS 2026 exercise. REPMUS (short for Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping using Maritime Uncrewed Systems) is an annual NATO exercise in which allied countries bring in unmanned underwater, surface and air systems to test them together in realistic maritime situations, writes Defence Blog.”