NAVAL DRONES

 by Tim Haynie, Spectrobotics, Business Development Mgr, thaynie(at)spectrabotics.com Spectral imagery collection and exploitation from a small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) was recently demonstrated at the Naval Post Graduate School’s Joint Interagency Field Experiment (JIFX) and the Secretary of Defense’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO) Thunderstorm 15-3 for both multi and hyperspectral sensor systems.  While spectral imagery collection and exploitation from high-altitude and satellite platforms have been around for many years and are well-documented, recent advancements in sUAS systems make them an ideal platform for spectral data collection for their increased resolutions, dynamic flight profiles and introduce a new dimension in data collection thinking. At the JIFX, the sUAS platform used for the Pixelteq SpectroCam ™ multispectral camera was an eight-engine multicopter controlled with a 3DR open-source Pixhawk flight control computer as found in many c...

Editor's note: Reprinted with permission from the Naval Postgraduate School's  CRUSER News . by Professor David Jenn, NPS Electrical Engineering Faculty, jenn(at)nps.edu There are numerous advantages of wireless power transfer (WPT) for many remote energy source and battery charging applications. In a WPT system, power is transmitted wirelessly from a base station to a client. The concept was first demonstrated for vehicle propulsion in the mid 1960s. More recently, WPT has been used for charging wireless devices, and commercial WPT charging technologies have appeared on the market under the names Witricity and Energous. Measurement setup used to obtain efficiency and coil installed in a UAV hull (photo courtesy NPS). In a typical WPT system, prime power is provided by the base station, converted to radio frequency, and then transferred through space to a receiving coil or antenna. On the client side the received power is filtered, transformed in voltage, a...

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...

Editor's Note: Operating a warship -- or any large vessel, for that matter -- is a very manpower intensive endeavor.  Although automation has improved engineering in particular, the basic functions of operating, maintaining, and cleaning a ship have remain relatively unchanged since steam replaced sail as a source of power.  Pile on training and war-fighting functions, and today's combatants require tireless efforts by their over-taxed crews, which have been reduced in the past decade for the sake of cost savings.    The blog has discussed numerous air, surface, and undersea unmanned technologies that have begun to make their mark on naval operations.  The impact on robotics on naval technologies is not limited solely to vehicles. Here, LT Scott Cheney-Peters discusses a robotic technology that may assist future sailors with logistics management: If you haven’t spent much time aboard a naval v...

An oft-cited draw-back of unmanned air systems is their vulnerability to a variety of threats including both physical, such as anti-aircraft fire, and electronic, including jamming.  Researchers and industry are beginning to more seriously examine these threats as the number of drones operating proliferates. How do UAVs stack up against these various threats, especially in the maritime environment? On the physical side, depending on what altitude they are operating, maritime UAVs face similar threats to helicopters and patrol aircraft.  Small tactical UAS flying surveillance missions at relatively low altitudes over-land or water are vulnerable to the simplest anti-aircraft threat, small arms fire .  In 2011, a Fire Scout UAV operating from USS Halyburton (FFG 40) over Libya was shot down by some sort of ground fire.  While flying over-water, drones might face close-in-weapons systems ranging from 20-30 mm to lar...

In a previous post , we cited funding threats to U.S. Navy unmanned systems programs and specifically called out ONR for some questionable R&D efforts.  In an effort towards fairness, the below video explains how ONR is working with other partners on a Common Control System for unmanned vehicles which will provide joint interoperability and produce a significant return on investment.  CCS is a hardware-agnostic tool using Kutta Tech's Bi-Directional Remote Video Transceiver to not only view sensor feeds from UAVs, but to control the sensors themselves and reduce operator workload.  

Much of the conversation surrounding the advent of naval drone warfare has focused on those platforms performing the more ‘kinetic’ types of warfare – anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare, air warfare – and those of the voyeuristic surveillance variety. However, a quick look at the composition of the carrier air wings of the U.S. Navy or the dispersed air units of a land campaign reminds us that supporting elements such as electronic warfare and command and control (C2) remain an integral part of modern combined operations. While it may not be as “sexy” as the ability to deliver a missile on target, the ability to maintain battlefield communications is arguably more important as it is an enabler of nearly all other actions.   In January, The Aviationist described the U.S. Air Force’s reiteration of the importance and utility of airborne assets providing communications by developing a new line-of-sight system: The U.S. Air Force is trying to turn the targeting pods ca...

In the December 2012 version of Proceedings , the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations discusses how the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum and cyber warfare have become intertwined into a single EM-cyber environment, one which will will have significant implications for future war-fighting. The CNO argues that the two primary keys to commanding the EM-cyber domain are a knowledge of the environment and agility.  Naval unmanned systems' role in both aspects of this rapidly evolving warfare domain will grow in importance. The CNO writes that knowing the EM-cyber environment requires the ability to "detect, assess,and predict in real time the activities going on in that domain." Because in most cases, unmanned systems are less expensive to procure than manned platforms, drones dedicated to electronic and cyber warfare can be deployed in large numbers, surveying a wider geographic area.  Additionally, UAVs are rapidly and easily upgrade...

Experimentation with large numbers of low cost quadrotors operating in swarms has produced some interesting results, including potential for future military applications.  Now some researchers in Germany are working to transition these concepts to the underwater realm, building autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that behave like fish in a school.  A team at the University of Luebeck's Institute of Computer Engineering has developed an affordable AUV designed for environmental surveys called MONitoring System and Underwater Navigation Robot (MONSUN ) II. MONSUN II is a 4 kilogram AUV equipped with a series of vertical and horizontal thrusters to maneuver and maintain orientation.  The vehicle maintains its position relative to other AUVs in the school using infrared sensors and a nose camera with a form of computer image recognition called "blob detection."  The swarming technology demonstrat...

As long as physical limitations constrain the range and endurance of unmanned air, surface, and sub-surface vehicles, they will need to operate in conjunction with larger platforms.  These motherships serve a wide variety of functions besides simply transporting, launching, and recovering unmanned vehicles.  They maintain and repair the drones, recharge or refuel their propulsion sytems, and they enable data collected from unmanned sensors to be downloaded, analyzed, and disseminated beyond the line-of-sight.  Characterizing the evolution of these unmanned vehicle motherships can help extrapolate how they might be used in the future. Generation I - Ad hoc platforms: This category includes legacy naval vessels ranging in size from patrol craft (US SOCOM's MK V at right, with ScanEagle) to large amphibious ships, and likely some day, aircraft carriers.  Minesweeping and hunting vessels have carried remotely opera...

As the recent Israeli shootdown of a Hezbollah UAV reminded us, it is relatively easy to destroy an unmanned aircraft. But what about the proliferating numbers of unmanned undersea vehicles?  The growth in these systems for naval applications will inevitably result in the requirement to counter an adversary's underwater drones.  Detection of a small man-made object moving underwater is not trivial, but also becoming easier with the advent of technologies such as high-resolution imaging sonars and Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) systems. However, once an AUV is detected, how can it be destroyed?  This problem set isn't new. Mini-subs and combat swimmers have threatened ships in port since World War II.  The old school way of dealing with frogmen is to drop a concussion grenade over the side of a boat.  Alternatively, some navies have experimented with  dolphins  to counter swimmers....

Bluefin-9 AUV (Bluefin Robotics) As a follow-up to our posts on powering drones in the future, Bluefin Robotics recently announced a unique concept: deep sea stations that recharge autonomous underwater vehicles.  The system is designed to wirelessly charge a Bluefin 9 AUV's 1.5 kWh lithium-polymer Subsea Battery using inductive coils. In addition to recharging the vehicle, the system has the added bonus of downloading data from the vehicle and transmitting it back to a home base.  The glut of data collected by modern 2 and 3D imaging sonars will require this sort of flexibility on long endurance AUV missions. The future naval implications of this technology are expansive, however the actual implementation might be challenging.  The system would work well in a permanent installation with AUVs on patrol keeping keep a navy port clear of mines or swimmers.  In an expeditionary environment for say...

Changing operational and environmental factors will drive future unmanned naval systems away from remote operation and towards autonomy.  Today, a man-in-the loop is generally required to re-task platforms as the weather deteriorates, operational priorities shift, or maintenance problems occur.   Automation will allow dynamic retasking to take place without human intervention. Additionally, u nmanned systems will increasingly operate beyond line-of-sight from their controllers and in areas prone to GPS or other electronic jamming, spoofing, and interference by adversary forces.    Moreover, as noted in t he U.S. Air Force’s 2010 Science and Technology Roadmap, autonomous vehicles will enable “operational advantages over adversaries who are limited to human planning and decision speeds.”   Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) require automation for the reasons mentioned above plus the simple fact that normal methods o...

Air-to-air refueling (AAR) has been commonplace in manned aviation for more than six decades.  Today, remotely piloted vehicles fly hundreds, and sometimes thousands of miles from their launch bases to for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.  The inability to refuel in-flight limits time on station and increases the number of aircraft required to surveil a given target location.  DARPA's KQ-X program, initiated in 2010, was designed to prove the technologies required to refuel UAVs in-flight. DARPA has released videos of the close-proximity test flight of two modified RQ-4A Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles.  The final test flight last May demonstrated the ability of close formation flight for most of a 2.5-hour engagement at 44,800 feet.  Although the UAVs did not actually pass fuel, post-flight analysis indicated that 60% of  attempts would achieve contact between the "Navy style"...

Unmanned naval systems are rapidly reaching the limitations of physics with regard to their endurance.  Current internal combustion and electrically powered systems have several drawbacks.  In addition to range/weight issues, liquid fuel engines make for noisy UAVs which can compromise missions in some circumstances, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconaissance.  Electrically-powered UAVs are quiet, but batteries do not approach the energy contained within a similar weight of fossil fuel.   This article clearly explains the physical limitations of current battery technologies.  Modern lithium-ion batteries are problematic due to their propensity to catch fire and explode.  SOCOM's billion dollar Advanced SEAL Delivery System (ASDS) fire  illustrated  why navies are not keen on carrying lithium-ion batteries at sea, especially undersea.  Clearly, alternative power technologies a...