A Danish company has developed the Blue Dragon system to protect Odesa from suicide bombers

The Danish company BlueShadow is working on developing the Blue Dragon system, designed to protect Odesa from Russian “Shahed” kamikaze drones. The system involves the use of a swarm of autonomous unmanned surface vessels designed to intercept aerial targets at a distance of 10–20 kilometers from the coast.

According to Maher, the project is primarily focused on protecting Ukraine’s coastal regions, which are regularly subjected to attacks from the sea.

“Our technology is designed to protect people in Ukraine’s coastal regions—primarily Odesa, which regularly suffers attacks by Shahed drones specifically from the sea, where air defense capabilities are limited,” he noted.

The project’s goal is to protect cities, critical infrastructure, and maritime trade.

“By protecting these key aspects of Ukraine’s coastal zone, we provide the freedom to withstand pressure from Russia and to recover even after hostilities in a hybrid war scenario,” the company’s founder emphasized.

The developers reported that the system includes two main technological components.

The first is the C4ISR platform, which enables a swarm of unmanned surface vessels to interact with Ukrainian force management systems, including Delta, “Kropiva,” and SkyMap. It receives information from these platforms and simultaneously transmits data from its own sensors to them.

The second component—Blue Shadow Edge—is an autonomous control module installed on each unmanned vessel.

It is this module that allows all vessels to operate as a single squadron, exchange information, and independently make decisions regarding the interception of aerial targets.

As Charles Maher explained, once a group of drones is detected, the system determines the most effective way to intercept them.

If the “Shaheds” are approaching from a certain direction, the artificial intelligence can deploy individual vessels or the entire swarm to that area.

Each unmanned boat detects a target, tracks it, classifies the threat, assesses the probability of a hit, verifies the result of the attack, and determines whether a second interception is necessary.

According to Maher, the main software platform is already operational and is being used for internal beta testing.

“We are currently in the development phase. The main platform is already operational, and we are using it for internal beta testing—it has already been demonstrated and is functioning,” he said.

Each autonomous vessel will be capable of carrying several interception systems, and the design itself is based on a modular configuration.

Depending on the mission, the platform can be equipped with interceptor drones, missile armaments, machine-gun modules, and, in the future, electronic warfare (EW) systems or other energy-based interceptors.

According to the founder of BlueShadow, the main limitation is not the software, but the number of vessels themselves and the interceptors installed on them.

“The real limitation, in my opinion, is the number of vessels and the interceptors on them. As for the number of targets the software can handle, it’s practically unlimited thanks to distributed sensing and powerful computing at the BlueShadow Edge level,” Charles Maher concluded.