A new sonar unit produced by Raytheon [RTN] will be deployed on an unmanned vessel procured by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of a program to explore autonomous navigation and submarine detection and tracking.
Raytheon’s Modular Scalable Sonar System (MS3), which it was revealing for the first time in announcing its role in the DARPA program this month, will be installed on DARPA’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), built by prime contractor SAIC [SAI].
Ed Hoak, Raytheon’s program manager for the ACTUV program, said the company expects to provide the sonar in 2014 ahead of an ACTUV test set for 2015. He said the goal of the test is to determine whether the vessel can operate on its own using a suite of sensors, including the mid-frequency MS3 sonar.
Hoak noted that there are more than 40 countries operating more than 600 submarines worldwide and that the ability to detect and track them autonomously would come cheaply compared to the cost of using surface vessels.
“This is intended to be a very low cost vehicle,” Hoak said in a phone interview.
The stand-alone MS3 sonar operates with less power than is required in legacy systems, takes up significantly less space and only relies on 15 serviceable parts compared to hundreds in older systems, Hoak said. He said Raytheon is submitting the MS3 in at least two international competitions for sonar systems, but did not provide details.
The MS3 has been designed to take humans out of the loop at detecting, tracking and classifying objects, and has significant enhancements to differentiate between real threats and targets versus background noise and clutter, particularly for close-to-shore, or littoral, operations, Hoak said.
Raytheon spent more than three years developing the new sonar system and has leveraged some of the technology for its work on the Zumwalt-class (DDG-1000) destroyers currently under construction for the U.S. Navy, Hoak said.