Technology Report

September 2, 2026

Guardian II

HAMBURG — When someone goes over the side of a ship, the standard answer is to send a smaller boat after them, and that boat needs a crew willing to go into the same water. Zelim, an Edinburgh technology company, spent this week in Hamburg arguing that the crew is the part to leave behind. On September 2, 2026, at the SMM maritime trade fair, it unveiled Guardian II, a seven-meter fast rescue craft designed to be launched, driven, and recovered with nobody aboard.

A fast rescue craft, or FRC, is the small boat a large vessel carries for exactly this errand. The Safety of Life at Sea Convention, SOLAS, requires many ships to carry one and sets standards for how quickly it can be put in the water. The difficulty is that sending it out in bad weather puts two or three more people into the sea state that just took the first one, and a master who judges that risk too high may not launch at all.

That is the gap Zelim says the design is aimed at. “Our next-generation Guardian II design addresses several critical safety challenges, including the inability to launch rescue boats in specific sea conditions due to crew risk, the high crew burden from manual handling, and the need for quicker and safer recovery of persons or objects from the water,” said Sam Mayall, the company’s chief executive.

The first Guardian was shown at the same fair in 2024: an 8.4-meter aluminum hull with a 400-horsepower diesel driving a waterjet, 30-plus knots, and capacity listed at 11 survivors. Zelim called it the world’s first unmanned and manned remotely controlled person-in-water rescue vessel — the company’s claim — and said it came out of four years of development with input from the United Kingdom’s Maritime & Coastguard Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Guardian II is shorter and more adjustable. Zelim describes a patented seven-meter hull available self-righting or with a single-point lift, and offered with a choice of propulsion: diesel jet inboard, jet outboard, or electric. A single-point lift means the boat hangs from one hook, which is what most shipboard davits — the cranes that swing a boat over the side — are built around. Self-righting means it comes back upright on its own after a capsize. Capacity goes up rather than down, to a maximum of 15 survivors, and the company says the craft is designed for deployment from a ship in under five minutes.

Two Zelim subsystems ride aboard. Swift is a conveyor that runs from the water up over the boat’s side, so a casualty who cannot climb, or cannot help at all, is carried in by machine instead of hauled in by arms; the company says it is type approved. ZOE is the detection software, computer vision watching video for a person in the water. In April Zelim said Lloyd’s Register certified ZOE to ISO 21195:2020, the international performance standard for automatic man-overboard detection systems on passenger ships, after 90 continuous days aboard the cruise ship Ambition, with a 97 percent detection rate in simulated man-overboard tests. Zelim says the system is trained on a proprietary maritime dataset of more than 9.5 million annotated objects. Bolted into a rescue boat rather than a ship’s rail, that software’s job changes: it runs a search and reports what it sees to whoever is holding the remote helm.

“With its range of potential configurations, Guardian II can be tailored to suit the requirements of a variety of markets and applications, from inland waterway light rescue to cruise lines and full oil and gas installations, as well as everything in between,” said Stewart Gregory, the chief operating officer. “Combined with our Swift system and a focus on remote helm operations, Guardian II is able to offer a fully integrated person-in-water retrieval system, with the capability to launch and recover the craft, unmanned.”

What the craft does not have yet is a certificate. Zelim says it is now working through type approval under SOLAS, the process that confirms marine safety equipment meets international technical and performance standards. Until that is finished, Guardian II is a demonstration rather than something a ship can count toward the rescue boat it is required to carry.

The company expects interest from cruise, offshore, and commercial shipping, and also from coastal rescue, defense, inland waterways, and leisure operators. Its detection software already has a commercial order to point at: in March, Zelim announced a contract to put ZOE aboard four hybrid-electric ferries being built for British Columbia Ferry Services, with installation expected to begin in 2027. The boat is a larger request. It asks an operator to accept that the craft sent after a person in the water will arrive with no one in it.

SMM runs September 1–4 in Hamburg. Ocean News & Technology also reported the debut.