A recent demonstration by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) showed that unmanned surface vessels (USVs) can operate as a team, ONR officials said Dec. 14.
During the “Swarm2” harbor-protection demonstration, which took place in September on the lower Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, four unmanned patrol boats shared a common picture of an area. They then performed “task allocation,” in which they worked together to figure out which boat would do what to accomplish their mission as a team, said Robert Brizzolara, the ONR program manager who oversaw the effort.
For example, when two threat-representative vessels entered an area, “we saw one USV assigned to track and trail first bad guy,” Brizzolara told reporters. “A few minutes later, the second hostile boat came into the box, and then the USVs again worked together to assign a second USV to track and trail that second hostile boat.”
By contrast, in a 2014 demonstration on the James River in Virginia, each of 13 boats worked alone to determine whether to escort a “high-value” ship or encircle a threat-representative vessel.
Both demonstrations involved the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing (CARACaS), a kit that can be installed on many types of small boats. ONR plans to conduct more technology development on CARACaS before scheduling another test event.
Besides ONR, several other entities participated in the 2016 demonstration, including the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Carderock Division, the Navy Warfare Development Command, a Navy small-boat group, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the Penn State Applied Research Laboratory, Spatial Integrated Systems Inc. and Daniel H. Wagner Associates. The Coast Guard observed the event.
Cmdr. Luis Molina, military deputy for ONR’s Sea Warfare and Weapons Department, said ONR hopes to conduct more frequent USV demonstrations as the technology matures.
“Eventually, we’re going to be incorporating USVs into hybrid operations with other forces, and we envision a future where this technology will be adopted and widely deployed,” Molina told reporters.