Digital manufacturing company Haddy has produced an uncrewed vessel designated the TF-179 Drone Boat using large-format robotic additive manufacturing. The company did not name the customer, disclose the mission profile, or publish length, displacement, propulsion or material data for the boat.
That omission leaves the TF-179 itself difficult to assess on its own terms. What can be assessed is the production system behind it, which Haddy has been documenting in public for the better part of a year, and which now represents one of the more concrete examples of additive manufacturing displacing mold-based construction in defense maritime work.
“The maritime industry is redefining how vessels are designed and manufactured. The TF-179 Drone Boat is part of that evolution,” the company said in its statement, adding that “the ability to rapidly produce, evaluate, and refine complex systems is becoming an increasingly important advantage.”
Eight robots, seven of them on rails
Haddy works out of a 32,000-square-foot microfactory in downtown St. Petersburg running eight Flexbot systems supplied and installed by manufacturer CEAD, which built out the facility in collaboration with Siemens. The Flexbots are hybrid cells, additive and subtractive in one envelope, with CNC post-processing integrated into the same workflow and Siemens Sinumerik control underneath.
Seven run on rails, and that is the detail that makes hulls possible. CEAD prints laterally against a vertical bed as the arm travels its track, which as co-founder Maarten Logtenberg explained to 3D Printing Industry leaves part length constrained only by the rail, he put 40-meter printed boats within reach of the approach.
A track record measured in days
The TF-179 is not Haddy’s first uncrewed vessel, and the shift into defense is recent. The company built its business on furniture, architectural elements and casting molds before turning the same robotic cells toward hulls over the past year.
HavocAI announced in March that its Harbinger, a 40-foot semi-submersible autonomous low-profile vessel built for contested logistics and resupply, had completed its maiden full-power voyage, designed, built, integrated and on the water in under 30 days. The hull was printed and delivered in nine days, with integration taking under a week after that.
HavocAI credited Haddy’s large-format additive manufacturing with producing the vessel at speed, and CEAD with supplying printers capable of a hull at that scale. Harbinger is a subscale platform at roughly 50 to 60 percent of intended size, built to exercise autonomous behaviors rather than to deploy, during the two weeks before the announcement it operated alongside other autonomous systems in coordinated resupply testing.
The scaling play came in April, when Red Cat Holdings’ maritime division Blue Ops signed a partnership with Haddy to install AI-driven robotic production systems at its Valdosta, Georgia facility, roughly doubling output across its five- and seven-meter USV lines. The arrangement also opens Haddy’s microfactory network to Blue Ops as surge capacity, production that can be redistributed across nodes when local capacity runs out, or shifted closer to where vessels will actually deploy.
The bottleneck is hulls
Haddy’s strategy assumes the constraint sits in hulls, not designs: producing them in quantity, without a mold per variant, close enough to the point of need that shipping doesn’t eat the time saved. The microfactory model answers all three, and the Blue Ops deal is that thesis in commercial form, Haddy’s systems installed inside someone else’s factory rather than pulling the work to Florida.
The same opening has drawn others in from different directions. ErectorCraft launched as the first U.S. company specializing in commercial production of 3D printed boat hulls, printing marine components in high-density polyethylene on its proprietary ErectorBot systems, and supplying those machines directly to shipyards and even onboard vessels so clients can fabricate structural parts on site. The decentralized logic is identical to Haddy’s, arrived at independently: cut the logistics chain by moving the printer rather than the part.
Established shipbuilders are testing the same ground more cautiously. Damen Compact Crafts partnered with CEAD to 3D print an HDPE workboat hull at CEAD’s Maritime Application Center in Delft, designing for inspection, patrol, support and logistics duties and treating the project explicitly as a technical evaluation of process capability, material performance and structural feasibility.
Printing a hull fast is now demonstrated. What comes next is proving it holds up over naval service life, across suppliers, the work that turns a capability into a qualified one.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows Haddy has produced an uncrewed vessel designated the TF-179 Drone Boat. Photo via Haddy.
