Denmark has registered four Saildrone Voyager drone boats, the first of the company’s uncrewed vessels to sail under a national flag. Saildrone announced the registration on 22 September. The 10-metre Voyagers carry cameras and radar, and nobody is aboard.
A flag gives a vessel its nationality at sea. The flag state’s rules and inspectors are the ones that apply to it, wherever it sails.
For ships with no crew, those rules are still being written. The International Maritime Organization adopted its first code for autonomous ships in May 2026. It is voluntary, covers cargo ships, and took effect on 1 July. A binding version is expected to be adopted by 1 July 2030 and to enter into force in 2032.
So the Danish Maritime Authority built a framework with Saildrone through its Regulatory Future Lab, which works with companies whose technology does not fit existing rules. “We must create room for innovation,” said Brian Adrian Wessel, the authority’s director general.
Saildrone says it is the only company whose autonomous vessels hold both a classification from the American Bureau of Shipping and a flag-state registration. Richard Jenkins, its founder and chief executive, said the company wants its larger Surveyor and Spectre vessels under the Danish flag too. Spectre is a 52-metre anti-submarine ship unveiled in April.
Denmark’s defence procurement agency signed for four Voyagers in 2025. They went to sea from Køge in June 2025 for a trial in the Baltic. Saildrone says the boats detected more than 170,000 vessels over six months, sailed more than 20,000 nautical miles and were available 92% of the time.
The company opened a permanent headquarters in Copenhagen this summer, with shipyard partners in the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. The IMO’s safety committee meets in December to set up a trial phase for the voluntary code.
