NAVAL DRONES

Manned (SH-60B) and unmanned (MQ-8B) helicopters working together on USS Halyburton (FFG 40) - Navy photo The carrier take-off and arrested landings of the U.S. Navy's X-47B demonstrator have garnered significant press attention this year.  Less noticed however, is the rapid development of rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles in the world's navies.  Recent operational successes of Northrop Grumman's MQ-8B Fire Scout aboard U.S. Navy frigates have led to many countries recognizing the value of vertical take-off and landing UAVs for maritime use.  International navies see the versatility and cost savings that unmanned rotary wing platforms can bring to maritime operations.  Like their manned counter-parts, these UAVs conduct a variety of missions including intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; cargo resupply/vertical replenishment; and in some future conflict will perform armed interdic...

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...

By Lt Matt Hipple In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, Sherlock Holmes laments, “You [Watson] see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.” Such is the current lament of America’s fleet of UCAVs, UGV’s, and other assorted U_V’s: they have neither concept nor recognition of the world around them. To pass from remote drones living on the edges of combat to automated systems at the front, drones must cross the Rubicon of recognition. To See The UCAV is the best place to start, as the skies are the cleanest canvas upon which drones could cast their prying eyes. As with any surveillance system, the best ones are multi-faceted. Humans use their five senses and a good portion of deduction.  Touch is a bit too close for UCAV, smell and hearing would be both useless and uncomfortable at high speed, and taste would be awkward. Without that creative deductive spark, drones will need a bit more than a Mk 1 Eyeball. Along with radar, good examples for how a drone might literally “see” bes...

In the July issue of Proceedings  (membership required), Royal Navy Commander John Craig argues for the retention of the U.S. Navy's mine countermeasures fleet primarily because unmanned underwater vehicles cannot replace them.  CDR Craig certainly has the credentials to comment smartly on this subject, having recently commanded Britain's 2nd Mine Countermeasures Squadron (2MCM). Bottom mine seen from SeaFox system camera (RN Photo) The U.S. Navy eventually plans to dispose of its MCM ships (the MHC class mine hunters were previously decommissioned in the 2000s) with the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) embarked with unmanned MCM systems as a planned replacement.  Regardless of the wisdom of this decision, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have been embraced by the U.S. and other modern navies, and are being acquired at a rapid pace.  The gradual shift towards unmanned MCM systems is likely a reflection of shrinking defense bu...

By Matt Hipple A  Roomba   is useful because it can sweep up regular messes without constant intervention, not because it can exit and enter its docking station independently. Although the Navy’s new X-47B Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) has, by landing on a carrier ,  executed an astounding feat even for humans, this ability only means our weapons have matured past their typical one-way trips. The real challenge will be getting a UCAV to defend units while sweeping up the enemy without remote guidance   (i.e. autonomously) . The answer is as close as the games running on your Xbox console. Player One: Insert Coin Considering the challenge of how an air-to-air UCAV might be programmed, recall that multiple generations of America’s youth have already fought untold legions of advanced UCAV’s . Developers have created artificial “intelligences” designed to combat a human opponent in operational and tactical scenarios with imperfect information; video games hav...

Naval Postgraduate School students continue to do interesting work in the field of unmanned aviation. LCDR Eric McMullen, USN, and MAJ Shane Grass, USA, conducted a research project entitled "Effects of UAV Supervisory Control on F-18 Formation Flight Performance in a Simulator Environment." The increase in cockpit workload attributed to new technologies and the shift from two-seat to single seat naval aircraft is taxing human mental capacity.   The Navy envisions that some day swarms of unmanned aircraft will be controlled at least in part by onboard flight crew and the research was designed to gage the impacts of this idea on flight performance. Data for the study was collected from 34 Navy and Marine aviators who flew three five-minute F-18 simulator sessions where their performance in formation flying was compared during two secondary distraction tasks. The "traditional" task was target persecution with a electro-optical Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR...

This concept proposal explores a technology solution to the problem of risk to first responders when identifying, neutralizing, and exploiting “surface-floating” maritime improvised explosive devices (SF/MIEDs). When considering the proliferation of technology for use against land-based improvised explosive devices (IEDs), it may be puzzling to many observers why remote IED Defeat (IEDD) technologies (particularly robots) have yet to fully cross over into the maritime domain.  Although some unmanned underwater vehicle programs designed for limpet mine-like object detection on ships are in development , much less attention has been given to countering SF/MIEDs. In general, the purpose of MIEDs is to destroy, incapacitate, harass, divert, or distract targets such as ships, maritime critical infrastructure and key resources (CI/KR), and personnel. MIEDs may also present obstacles (real or perceived) with the purpose of area denial or egress denial. As a subset of the MIED family, t...