NAVAL DRONES

By Heiko Borchert On 15 December 2016, China seized an  Ocean Glider , an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), used by the U.S. Navy to conduct oceanographic tasks in international waters about 50-100 nautical miles  northwest of the Subic Bay port  on the Philippines. Available information suggests that the glider had been deployed from USNS  Bowditch  and was captured by Chinese sailors that came alongside the glider and grabbed it “despite the radioed protest from the  Bowditch  that it was U.S. property in international waters,” as the  Guardian  reported. The U.S. has “ called upon China  to return the UUV immediately.” On 17 December 2016 a  spokesman of the Chinese Defense Ministry  said China would return the UUV to the “United States in an appropriate manner.” Initial legal assessments by U.S. scholars like  James Kraska and Paul Pedrozo  suggest the capture is violating the law of the sea, as the unmanne...

By Marjorie Greene The U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Systems Directorate, or N99, was formally stood up this past September with the focused mission of quickly assessing emerging technologies and applying them to unmanned platforms. The Director of Unmanned Warfare Systems is Rear Adm. Robert Girrier, who was recently  interviewed by Scout Warrior ,  and outlined a new, evolving Navy Drone Strategy. The idea is to capitalize upon the accelerating speed of computer processing and rapid improvements in the development of autonomy-increasing algorithms; this will allow unmanned systems to quickly operate with an improved level of autonomy, function together as part of an integrated network, and more quickly perform a wider range of functions without needing every individual task controlled by humans. “We aim to harness these technologies. In the next five years or so we are going to try to move from human operated systems to ones that are less dependent on people. Technology is goin...

Classifying unmanned maritime systems by their operating domain: air, surface, or underwater - is both convenient and intuitive. But recently, navy and industry researchers have begun to explore the advantages of platforms that can operate in two domains, muddying the nomenclature.  In the past year, several prototype multi-domain unmanned vehicles have been introduced.   CRACUNS The most popular combination of these hybrid drones is the air/sub-surface mixture - UAVs that float or swim.  Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland introduced t he Corrosion Resistant Aerial Covert Unmanned Nautical System ( CRACUNS ), a submersible UAV designed to operate in the littorals which can be launched from a fixed position underwater or from an unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV). Rutger University's entry into the fray of flying/swimming drones is the Naviator , which can actually maneuver (sort of) underwater before surfacing and taking off....

by F. Patrick Filbert, Subject Matter Analyst-UAS, frederic.filbert.ctr(at)pacom.mil As technology improves, so does the capacity to expand a defensive perimeter to ever increasing ranges both horizontally and vertically. Identifying ways to penetrate this perimeter with assets and capabilities that do not require ever more expensive solutions requires creative use of current and emerging technological advances. Potential adversaries understand the United States (U.S.) is extremely technologically advanced with its warfighting systems. This requires a thinking enemy to develop ways to keep America’s advanced systems outside their sphere of influence; specifically, to both deny and create an inability to gain access to specific areas of operation. In the current vernacular, this is called creating an anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) environment which has, as its backbone, advanced integrated air defense systems (IADS). A Bit of History  Being able to provide a “layered” offens...

by Prof Mark Nissen, NPS, mnissen(at)nps.edu Command & control (C2)[1] is quintessentially important to military endeavors. As Joint Publication 6-0[2] elaborates authoritatively (I-1): “Effective C2 is vital for proper integration and employment of capabilities.” Further, our contemporary and informed understanding of C2 indicates that it applies to much more than just the technologic underpinnings of command and control systems. As Naval Doctrine Publication 6[3] reinforces: “… technology has broadened the scope and increased the complexity of command and control, but its [C2] foundations remain constant: professional leadership, competence born of a high level of training, flexibility in organization and equipment, and cohesive doctrine.” Joint Publication 6-0 expounds (I-2): “Although families of hardware are often referred to as systems, the C2 system is more than simply equipment. High-quality equipment and advanced technology do not guarantee adequate communications or...

by Kenneth Stewart, NPS, kastewar(at) nps.edu  Students and faculty from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) and the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) recently came together with teams of junior officers from U.S. Navy Third Fleet to discuss the ethics of unmanned systems for the 2015 iteration of the Robo-Ethics Continuing Education Series. This year’s event was led via video teleconference by NPS Associate Professor Ray Buettner, April 14. “We are interested in exploring the ethical boundaries of robotic systems … preparing tools to figure out what the future will be like,” said Buettner. But as student and faculty researchers wade into the at-times turbulent waters of unmanned systems, they are also exploring the many ethical considerations that autonomous combat systems present. “Should a machine be able to decide to kill, and if so, what does ‘decide’ mean?” Buettner asked assembled students and others joining via video teleconference from USNA and elsewhere. “The key concept t...

The researchers at CoCoRo continue to push the limits of autonomy and swarming behavior with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).  Recently, they've taken their AUVs out of the controlled laboratory tanks and into the wild, with small scale tests in ponds, lakes, and protected ocean harbors. These robots are prototypes designed to explore small scale autonomous group behavior.  But the ocean tests hint at possibilities of using smaller marine robots to perform useful functions. Unmanned Underwater Vehicles employed in military and research operations range in size from man portable, weighing less than 100 pounds, to monsters such as Boeing's Echo Ranger , which weighs more than 5,000 kilograms. Small scale AUVs weighing less than a few kilograms or so are limited in endurance primarily due to battery size.  More importantly, the ocean environment presents a number of challenges for tinier AUVs including surf and currents, poor visibility, and even hungry marin...

Researchers at Austria's University of Graz have demonstrated the largest collection of swarming autonomous underwater vehicles with their Collective Cognitive Robots (CoCoRo) project.  A total of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) were assembled for recent swarm testing at the University's  Artificial Life Lab . Though funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) with the intention of developing civilian innovations for environmental monitoring and research, CoCoRo has implications for future military unmanned underwater vehicle swarm activity.   Under development since 2011, CoCoRo's swarm demonstration consists of three types of robots: Jeff is an agile fish-like robot with various pressure and magnetic sensors for obstacle detection, avoidance, and navigation.  The swarm also featured 20 saucer-shaped Lily robots that randomly search for objects while communicating with each other using blue-LED lights.  The...