Underground is the one domain where the ground itself kills a link, so nothing here carries a radio and nothing navigates on a satellite signal. One coiled-tubing plant is sent to two different kinds of work. Everything else in the family enters, listens, rides or holds ground somebody has already opened.
Every family on this site works one domain. This is the only one where the ground defeats a link on its own, and that single condition settles the architecture before anything else is chosen.
Rock and soil absorb a radio signal outright, and a satellite fix does not reach a metre below the surface. A design that leans on either fails at the moment it is needed. So no design in this family carries either one. There is no receiver to defeat and no fix to spoof, because neither is aboard.
What replaces them is a physical optical fibre with a person on the far end of it. On the boring side that fibre carries the steering data back up from the head, the telemetry, the feed downhole and the breadcrumb out; on the sensing side it carries a node's report to a monitored console. It is a wire. It cannot be jammed, spoofed or direction-found, and it keeps a person in the loop by construction rather than by policy.
Nothing in this family is launched. Every platform here is emplaced: surveyed in with the discipline a directional-drilling crew already runs, positioned and anchored, worked with a person holding the loop, then recovered along its own fibre or logged and left in place by decision. The four effects across the whole family are recon, mapping, sensing and physical interposition, and the one physical response any machine here can make is to stand in the way.
Human safety comes first, on every line. No radio and no satellite navigation in any Canadian Shield design. Nothing in this family carries a warhead, a fuze or an energetic material, and nothing here operates a weapon.
Competence underground is not acquired in a program cycle. It is bought with years in the ground, and the group had them before any of this was drawn.
The group carries three decades of horizontal-directional-drilling practice in-house, on plant that runs to mobile rigs of 1,000,000 lb pull. That is where the working method of this family comes from: the survey before the bore, the alignment planned rather than hoped for, the locating discipline over the top of a run, and the reading of what the string is telling the operator through the drive.
It matters because the hard problem down here is not the machine. An airframe iterates in months against air that behaves the same everywhere. Ground does not: the same plant in soft clay and in firm ground is two different jobs, and knowing which one you are in before the string is committed is the part that takes years to learn.
What the trade contributes. Bore-path planning, entry geometry, anchor and reaction load, locating over a run, tooling selection to the formation, and the judgement of when a run is being pushed past what the string will take. Those are practices, and they came across whole.
What the design adds. A plant sized to a bore a person can carry conduit into, not a pipeline crossing; a head that displaces the face instead of cutting it; and a guidance loop that runs down the hole on a wire instead of a walkover locator on the surface above.
The family has a spine, and it is a single sentence worth saying once for the whole family before either program page opens.
One coil reel. One hydraulic straightener. One clamp-and-push stroke drive. One fibre-guided steerable head. The drive grips the tubing, strokes it forward a fixed increment, releases and resets, and a person steers the head off attitude sensing carried back up the same fibre. That plant is CS-410 and it is also Aquifer CS-411. A designation on this family names an application rather than a separate machine.
It also stays where you can see it. This is a surface plant, and nothing enters the ground but the tubing and the head. Stroke-count odometry off the drive gives distance-along-bore without a single emission, and where the job wants conduit the tubing is itself the delivered product, left in the bore behind the head.
What changes between them is the ground and the job. CS-410 is the plant pointed at ground that has to be made rather than found, driving a bore forward and laying conduit as it goes. Aquifer CS-411 is the same plant pointed at utility and infrastructure ground, installing conduit along a planned alignment and logging the ground it passes through as a record the client uses directly. Two program pages, one machine.
The two applications share the drive family, the tube and the buckling behaviour that governs any long thin string in a hole. What differs starts at the head, and the rest of the table follows from that one choice.
Aquifer CS-411 jets and cuts the face, so there are cuttings and they have to be carried back out. CS-410 displaces the face instead: the soil goes into the wall of the bore rather than into the annulus, so there is nothing to carry back and nothing returns. That single choice reaches the weight the drive has to put on the bit, the fluid the plant has to move, and the depth each application works to.
| What differs | Aquifer CS-411 · civil | CS-410 · defence |
|---|---|---|
| Head action | Jets and cuts the face | Displaces the face |
| Weight on bit | ~2 kN, jetting | 3–25 kN, ground-set |
| Spoil | Returns as cuttings | None. It goes into the wall |
| Fluid duty | Cuttings transport | Lubrication and annulus fill |
| Flow the plant moves | 163 L/min | About 4 L/min |
| Depth worked to | 30 m | 5 m nominal |
| Hole spent before the lateral starts | About 159 m | About 30 m |
The same coil-tube drive family in two applications, on the family's own engineering figures. Each program page carries the rest.
The flow row is the one that changes the machine. A cutting bore has to lift its spoil and that sets the flow; a displacement bore has no spoil, so flow falls to annulus fill plus what leaks off into the formation. The gap between the two is a factor of thirty-nine, and it turns the fluid end of the plant from a large machine into a small one. That is also what makes nothing returns a volume balance rather than a slogan: pump the fill rate plus leak-off and there is nothing left over to come back.
One repeated mechanical cycle puts the string in the ground, and everything the operator knows about where the head is comes back up the same wire that steers it.
The reel pays tubing into a hydraulic straightener, which takes the reel-set curvature out of the string before it reaches the drive. The clamp-and-push stroke drive is the heart of the plant: a clamp grips the tubing, a stroke advances it a fixed increment, the clamp releases and resets, and the cycle repeats. An entry guide sets the initial heading at the surface and protects the tubing as it enters the bore. Downhole, a steerable head does the work at the face.
Two things come back to the operator and neither of them radiates. Attitude sensing behind the head rides the fibre up to the console, which is how a person steers ground they cannot see. Stroke count off the drive gives distance-along-bore, because the drive already knows how far each stroke moved the string. Lose the attitude read and the drive stops and holds rather than advancing blind. The plant part by part, the reach classes and what the ground does to them are on CS-410.
A plant that has to work where there is no road is specified by how it arrives as much as by what it does once it is standing there.
The plant is built in formats rather than as one machine with options. It travels on a road trailer behind a standard tow vehicle. It sits on a rigid skid frame for crane, hook or deck placement. It packs as an air-deployable module on a drop frame with lift points and tie-downs, for ground no road reaches. On the civil side the same plant travels on its own trailer and in a containerized module that lifts off it.
The format changes how the plant arrives and nothing else. Same reel, same straightener, same clamp-and-push drive, same displacement bore, same fibre-only guidance, same person holding the loop for the whole run. Every job still starts with the survey a directional-drilling crew runs today, and the entry line still has to be positioned and anchored for reaction load whichever way the plant got there. If a run stops early the string holds where it stopped.
Only the plant bores. Everything else in the family is put into a passage, a bore or a line somebody has already opened, and that split is the fastest way to place your own problem inside the family.
A buyer usually arrives with one of two problems. Either something has to reach a place there is no route to, in which case the answer is a plant that makes the route and leaves conduit behind it. Or a route exists already — a tunnel, a culvert, a service passage, a pipeline, a duct bank, the ground itself around a perimeter — and the problem is knowing what is in it, hearing what moves through it, or standing in it. Four programs answer the second case, and none of them turns a bit.
A tracked crawler carried to an access point and put in by hand. It maps the passage, sends recon back over the fibre and carries the sensing a confined space needs before a person enters one.
A passive node, surveyed in, augered or hand-buried, spliced to a fibre, and covered over. It does not move again and it emits nothing over the air. It listens, and reports on a wire.
What a run of those nodes becomes, strung node to node on a fibre trunk back to one monitored head-end. It detects, localizes and cues a person, and no strike authority exists in the loop.
A carrier that never touches a bit to soil. It rides pipe, culvert and conduit that already exist, on the flow of a live line, under its own power, or on a tether. The line stays in service.
Six programs in the Underground family — each with its mechanism, its doctrine and its deployment on its own page. The whole roster, all 13 programs across the fleet, is on the programs index.
Underground
A surface plant that pushes a steerable head into ground with no line, no map, no signal.
CS-411 · Underground
Coiled-tubing bore, fibre-guided — conduit installed, water table mapped, nothing to jam.
Recon, mapping and locating in existing tunnels and culverts — with a block-only interpose capability, always human-confirmed.
Underground
A passive seismic and acoustic node on long-life battery — reporting only over a buried fibre link.
A tunnel, a culvert or a service passage is a hole a person could enter and should not. CS-425 is the machine that enters it instead, and the worst passage on the mission is what sizes it.
CS-425 is a small tracked crawler drawn to clear the passages it works rather than to fight in them, sized for tunnels and culverts of about 450 mm in diameter and above. It carries forward and aft cameras, a lidar and mapping unit that builds a live map of the passage as it advances, and a gas sensor package for confined space. Fibre-tethered teleoperation is the default, with a person in the loop for every judgement.
The clock is the part worth understanding before an enquiry. A crawler put into a passage on a cue does not sprint to intercept. It moves at a working pace through real ground, so the time it can buy comes from how early the detection arrived, never from the vehicle's speed. That is the argument for a picket in front of it, and it is set out with the crawler's envelope, power budget, tether and recovery on CS-425.
The family's two quietest programs are one product and what that product becomes when there are fifty of them on one buried wire.
CS-430 is the node: a sealed cylindrical housing of about 90 mm diameter and about 380 mm length at about 4.5 kg, seated at a surveyed position, spliced into a buried fibre and covered at 0.3–1.0 m nominal depending on the site. From that moment it neither moves nor transmits, because there is no radio in it to turn on. A tri-axial geophone, an accelerometer and an acoustic sensor read what the ground and the air carry to it, and most of its life is spent listening at a power the battery barely notices. Emplaced alone, it is a listening post in its own right.
Trembler Line CS-435 is what a run of those nodes becomes, strung node to node on a fibre trunk back to one monitored head-end. Vibration reaches the nearest node first and its neighbours a beat later, and the pattern of arrival times across the chain places a rough position and a bearing. What the line hears depends entirely on what is making the noise: footsteps are the short-range, expensive case, hand digging carries further, and machine tunnelling is the longest-range class of all, at order 100 m+ per node in favourable ground.
A detection becomes a cue on the fibre to a person at the console, never a decision of its own. The cue carries a confidence rather than a certainty, the confirmation gate does not move, and no strike authority exists anywhere in the loop. Spacing is a survey output rather than a catalogue number, because the ground sets the range. The node is on CS-430 and the line it becomes is on Trembler Line CS-435.
Most of the network a utility or a pipeline operator needs to know the inside of is already buried and already accessible. CS-460 is the carrier that uses it.
CS-460 takes its form from a mature tool class. The trade has run devices through live lines for cleaning and inspection for decades, and the group's pipeline practice runs them today. The carrier keeps the body, the sealing discs and the launcher-and-receiver handling of that trade and builds them out as a train of short modules rather than one fixed tool, sized to nominal bore classes from about 150 to 600 mm with the disc set matched to the bore it is going into.
Every payload the bay takes is non-kinetic: wall-thickness and corrosion gauging, geometry and deformation mapping, run odometry, and the inspection package as the baseline case. Pipe and conduit are dead to radio by their nature, so the family rule costs nothing to keep here and no link in any mode goes over the air. What each mode buys, where each one stops and why bends rather than metres set a tethered run's reach are on CS-460.
One guidance tier is the default down here and one autonomy ceiling is fixed. Neither of them radiates, and neither is a setting somebody can change.
The fleet is built against three guidance tiers and the same ladder runs across all four domains. Underground the default is the middle one, and the ground is the reason rather than a preference: a physical link is the only continuous one there is.
AI plans. Rules govern. Humans authorize. Safety has veto. Underground the fibre enforces that order, because the loop runs through a person and nothing here can close it without one. The ladder and the four domains it runs across are on the technology page; the rules the fleet is held to are on doctrine.
What each one does, the ground it works and where its specification lives. Two of the six bore, and those two are the same machine.
| Program | What it does | The ground it works | The page |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS-410 | Pushes a steerable head where there is no hole and leaves the tubing as conduit | Ground that has to be made, on a defence objective | CS-410 |
| Aquifer CS-411 | The same plant on civil work: conduit installed, ground logged as the bore advances | Ground that has to be made, on utility and infrastructure work | Aquifer CS-411 |
| CS-425 | Enters, maps, senses and, on a confirmed cue, stands in the way | Tunnels, culverts and service passages that already exist | CS-425 |
| CS-430 | Is buried, goes still and listens. A passive seismic and acoustic node | Undisturbed ground at a surveyed position | CS-430 |
| Trembler Line CS-435 | A run of nodes on one fibre trunk that detects, localizes and cues a person | A perimeter, an approach or a chokepoint | Trembler Line CS-435 |
| CS-460 | Carries a payload through a line without opening it, and the line stays in service | Pipe, culvert and conduit already in the ground | CS-460 |
Every program in the family has its own page, and each page carries its own specification from its own sources.
The buyer's door, what a first conversation needs and what to rule out before writing are on Who It Is For. Underground is one of four domains: the fleet carries Air and Water beside it and CDNS KAOS on the ground, every program across the domains sits on programs, and the enterprise's other half is CDNS Autonomy, the removable operator for machines a customer already runs.
One list settles most of a first conversation down here: what the family will not do, on every program and in every configuration, whatever the ground and whoever the customer.
Two of those lines are properties, not policy. There is no radio in any design here to switch on, and no strike capability anywhere in the family for a loop to order. Neither is a mode a customer could configure.
Start with the alignment, the line or the passage, and what has to reach the far end of it.
Six pages under this one carry the family in full. The plant is on CS-410 and, in its civil application, on Aquifer CS-411. The passage worker is on CS-425, the buried node on CS-430, the chain those nodes become on Trembler Line CS-435, and the carrier that rides an existing line on CS-460. The buyer's door is Who It Is For, and the fleet doctrine all of them sit under is on Doctrine.
Write with the ground, the line or the passage in front of you, and say who stands over it today. Every enquiry is screened before any discussion; international transfer is export-controlled and subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment, export posture is counsel-first, and government and allied procurement has a door of its own. The reply comes in writing, from a person.
All Underground family designs are patent pending; international transfer is export-controlled and subject to Canadian government permits taken per shipment, and nothing on this page is an offer.
