The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) successfully completed its anti-submarine unmanned vessel program and officially transferred the technology demonstration vessel, called the Sea Hunter, to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) on Tuesday.
DARPA said ONR plans to continue developing the Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) prototype vehicle as the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV). DARPA said ONR may develop it into a new class of unmanned ocean-going vessels that can travel for thousands of miles over open seas for months at a time.
The Leidos [LDOS]-developed Sea Hunter is the first full-scale autonomous technology ship demonstrator in the ACTUV program. It was originally planned to possibly track stealthy diesel electric submarines.
ONR now plans further at-sea tests to further develop the ACTUV/MDUSV technologies. This includes automating payload and sensor data processing, rapidly developing new mission-specific autonomous behaviors, and exploring autonomous coordination among multiple USVs.
DARPA said that pending the test results, MDUSV could transition to Navy operations by 2018.
DARPA and ONR first started collaborating on the program in September 2014, when the agencies agreed to jointly fund an extended test phase of an ACTUV prototype. The Sea Hunter was christened in April 2016 and then moved from a DARPA-led design and construction project to open-water testing with ONR. It finished initial at-sea tests off the coast of San Diego in June 2016 (Defense Daily, July 26, 2016).
At-sea testing began in October 2016 and from February – September 2017 the Sea Hunter passed three progressively harder tests to integrate its suites and use them to comply with international regulations to prevent collisions at sea (COLREGS) in operationally realistic scenarios.
Sea Hunter was also tested on flexibility to conduct various missions by switching modular payloads. It successfully conducted DARPA Towed Airborne Lift of Naval Systems (TALONS) research work in September 2016 (Defense Daily, Oct. 25, 2016) and used a mine countermeasures (MCM) payload in August 2017, DARPA said.
The director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO), Fred Kennedy, said the ACTUV program is a new vision on surface warfare “that trades small numbers of very capable, high-value assets for large numbers of commoditized, simpler platforms that are more capable in the aggregate.”
“The U.S. military has talked about the strategic importance of replacing ‘king’ and ‘queen’ pieces on the maritime chessboard with lots of ‘pawns,’ and ACTUV is a first step toward doing exactly that,” he said in a statement.
Alexander Walan, a program manager in the TTO, added that the agencies’ collaboration has yielded good results and moving Sea Hutner from DARPA to ONR is a “significant milestone in developing large-scale USV technology and autonomy capabilities.”
“Our collaboration with ONR has brought closer to reality a future fleet in which both manned warships and capable large unmanned vessels complement each other to accomplish diverse, evolving missions,” Walan said in a statement.
For his part, ONR program officer for MDUSV Robert Brizzolara said he appreciated DARPA’s “truly impressive work” in advancing the technology.
“As ACTUV transfers from DARPA to ONR, ONR is looking forward to continuing and capitalizing on the science and technology work. In particular, we are already working on autonomous control, a challenging area that is key to maturing MDUSV and delivering it to the fleet,” Brizzolara added.