By Geoff Fein

This summer, the Navy will begin testing a prototype advanced camera for Los Angeles-class submarine periscopes that will provide a 360-degree scan of the surrounding waters.

Developed by Massachusetts-based RemoteReality, the prototype will also provide nighttime views using an infrared sensor, Dennis McGinn, chairman and chief executive officer, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

One idea behind the company’s prototype is to enable submarines to get a quick 360-degree view, thus avoiding prolonged exposure by the boat’s periscope.

McGinn, a retired vice admiral, said that his experience in anti-submarine warfare (ASW) exercises demonstrated that a large percentage of submarines were detected either by visual sighting or radar detection of a periscope or the wake of a periscope.

“Submariners, from a self-protection standpoint …defensive standpoint…try to maintain their stealth profile to minimize the time they have something sticking up above the waves,” he said.

But the primary driver for RemoteReality’s system is to help boats avoid incidents such as the 2001 collision between the USS Greeneville (SSN-772) and the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru near Oahu, Hawaii.

“Part of the board of inquiry that was done afterward determined [the Greeneville] had gone up to periscope depth, but because of a combination of the water conditions and the limitations of the field of view, the scan rate around the horizon by the periscope, they had missed the presence of the ship and they assumed that nothing was there,” said McGinn, who was the deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs before retiring.

“With a system like ours they would have been able to get that quick look…as they were positioning for the maneuver they were going to do and then they would have detected [the Ehime Maru],” he added.

Right now submarines have various sensors on the periscope, but they all have the common characteristics of a limited field of view, McGinn noted. “With our day/night periscope system on there, you put the periscope up and have an instantaneous picture all the way around the horizon…360-degrees, without having to turn the periscope or the camera to compensate for the limited field of view.”

The image can then be displayed in a panoramic view on a flat screen monitor–divided into two 180-degree, undistorted, views, McGinn said.

RemoteReality is working with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, R.I., on installation and testing of the prototype.

“It’s in the process [of being installed],” McGinn said. “The key milestone we are pleased to see, they are going to take it out to sea in the Pacific in June.”

The day/night 360-degree camera consists of two optic systems, lenses, that provide the 360-degree panoramic view. One sensor is for daytime, visual light while the other is for infrared. The signal is then fed down to existing display systems in the submarine’s command center, he added.

“We have worked with NUWC as far as the best way to integrate the product of these sensors into the existing displays,” McGinn said.

RemoteReality has been using common off-the-shelf modules to avoid a situation where the submarine has this wonderful sensor, but there is a horrible integration problem, McGinn said.

“We eliminate the integration problem right up front by the approach we have for using existing software modules,” he added.

“One of the things we are really proud about, as a small high tech company, we were able to meet very, very stringent standards. The real estate on a submarine periscope is precious, and the challenge is to get the right size package that is compatible with other sensors and electronics, and the mechanical gear in that very, very limited space,” McGinn said. “We were able to do that very smoothly, right on time, and the relationship with the Navy engineers at NUWC and the program office has just been superb.”

The company has also been exploring surface and land uses for this technology too, McGinn added.

They have been working with the Coastal Area Protection System program office at Panama City, Fla. McGinn said the technology is deployed down there.

“It has a lot of great capability [that] it brings to the mission area of coastal area protection, harbor protection–from both a security standpoint and safety and monitoring standpoint,” he said.

The technology has also been deployed on Humvees, and McGinn sees the potential for the camera’s use on Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams Tanks to improve situational awareness and driver vision enhancement.