Haddy prints TF-179 drone boat with eight-robot microfactory

At Haddy’s 32,000-square-foot microfactory in downtown St. Petersburg, eight robots are turning a manufacturing experiment into a boat. The company has produced the uncrewed TF-179 Drone Boat with large-format robotic 3D printing, but has not disclosed its customer, mission, dimensions, propulsion or materials.

The machinery explains why the hull matters more than the boat’s missing specifications. Seven of Haddy’s eight Flexbot systems run on rails, printing sideways against a vertical bed while the robotic arm travels along the track. The same cells combine additive manufacturing with CNC finishing, under Siemens Sinumerik control. Haddy co-founder Maarten Logtenberg said the setup could put 40-meter printed boats within reach.

This is not Haddy’s first uncrewed vessel, but the move into defense is recent. HavocAI’s Harbinger, a 40-foot semi-submersible autonomous vessel for contested logistics and resupply, was designed, built, integrated and placed on the water in under 30 days. Its hull was printed and delivered in nine days, with integration taking under a week. That platform was a subscale test vehicle, built to exercise autonomous behaviors rather than deploy.

Haddy is now pushing the same production logic beyond Florida. In April, Red Cat Holdings’ maritime division, Blue Ops, signed a partnership to install AI-driven robotic production systems at its Valdosta, Georgia facility, with the aim of roughly doubling output across its five- and seven-meter uncrewed surface vessel lines. The arrangement also makes Haddy’s microfactory network available as surge capacity, allowing production to shift between sites or closer to deployment locations.

Concretely, this could let shipyards produce hulls in quantity without making a new mold for every variant, while reducing the time and distance involved in moving large structures. That matters for uncrewed boats, where designs may change quickly and demand can move between locations. But the TF-179 itself is still difficult to judge: no mission profile or performance data has been published, and the durability of printed hulls over naval service life still needs to be demonstrated across materials and suppliers.

Haddy has shown that printing a hull quickly is possible. The next step is turning that speed into a qualified, repeatable maritime production process.