Rowden supports AUKUS Maritime Big Play Capstone exercise

Rowden engineers supported this year's AUKUS Maritime Big Play Capstone exercise in the US, testing and experimenting with the Edge Inference Stack, a MOD-owned capability being developed with the Royal Navy under AUKUS Pillar II.

AUKUS Maritime Big Play brings together the three AUKUS partner nations for operational experimentation at scale, testing emerging technologies in realistic, integrated environments.

For Rowden, the Capstone exercise provided an opportunity to put the Edge Inference Stack through its paces, working alongside the Royal Navy and international partners to better understand the practical requirements for deployment and integration.

The Edge Inference Stack is being developed around the principle of 'any model, any platform', enabling AI models to be deployed, run, and managed across different computing platforms without being tied to specific hardware or suppliers.

Our participation builds on previous development and experimentation, helping to identify technical challenges, validate engineering approaches, and gather evidence to inform the next stages of capability development.

This work forms part of Rowden's wider engineering focus on making advanced software and AI capabilities usable at the operational edge, where systems must perform reliably despite constraints on connectivity, power, bandwidth, and compute.

The next stage will focus on applying the evidence and lessons learned from Maritime Big Play, continuing to work with the Royal Navy and AUKUS partners to refine the capability and support its integration into future programmes.