Wired's Danger Room blog covers the US Navy push to build robotic submarines. The current models aren't quite up to what the Navy needs. However, the technology is getting close to what is needed by illicit traffickers, who are only going to be a few steps behind anything done by military contractors.
Traffickers just need to get across the Caribbean or up the Pacific coast. Then they need to cross the Atlantic to Africa or Europe to get drugs or other contraband to those markets.
For the traffickers, it's an issue of technology and then scalability. They need the tech to be cheap enough so that the contraband pays for the transportation plus they can absorb some seizures and lost items. The technology and cost are not there yet. However, I bet we see the first robotic underwater drone used by a criminal group inside a decade, at least as a test run.
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