Navy Looking to Expand Range, Speed of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles - Blog
The Navy wants unmanned underwater vehicles that are faster, with better target identification and data transmission capabilities, officials told industry Nov. 6.
The caveat: They have to be inexpensive enough for the service to afford in a constrained budget environment.
“If you’ve got a piece of kit out there right now, and you want to see if we like it and we’ll use it, give me what you’ve got now, and then we’ll work together" to modify it, Capt. Eric Wirstrom, director of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command’s maritime operation center, said in a speech at he Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s program review.
However, “I need it cheap,” he stressed
Rob Simmons, assistant program manager for PMS 408, the Navy’s program office for acquiring explosive ordnance disposal technologies, said the service wants to buy vessels that are “good enough,” not expensive developmental technologies.
“We want to field the 80 percent solution with … open architecture hooks” that allow the service to upgrade systems with new software and sensors further down the road, he said. UUVs must be operationally available for use, reliable and transportable.
The Navy’s expeditionary force only recently begun to use UUVs to detect explosives under the water’s surface, Wirstrom said. “When it comes to requirements generation and development, we are figuring that out and we’re getting faster and better.”
The undersea environment ascribes limitations to UUVs that their airborne and terrestrial brethren do not have to deal with. For instance, pilots can remotely control a drone via a satellite link, but since that is impossible underwater, UUVs rely much more on autonomy. That also keeps many underwater vehicles from being able to transfer data in real time to human operators.
Wirstrom laid out a wishlist of capabilities he would like industry to bring him, including smaller, man-portable systems and UUVs that can be launched and recovered from aircraft, surface ships and submarines.
