autonomous and unmanned under-
water vehicles (UUVs) to carry out
the dull, dirty and truly dangerous
jobs otherwise performed by humans.
“While the Navy has kept pace in con-
ducting foundational research and
developing prototype systems in this
area, there is significant value yet to be
realized in operationalizing military
systems,” it reads. “Currently deployed
countermine applications use UUVs
for persistence and protecting humans
from danger, but rely on human oper-
ators at a command center to process
data for target classification. This is
followed by a separate mission to neu-
tralize any mines detected. Autonomy
can reduce both the time to neutralize
the threat and the danger to the per-
sonnel assigned to the task.”
This is precisely why the Navy’s
MIW S&T programs continue to work
toward developing automated under-
water, surface and airborne unmanned
platforms to assist manned platforms
and warfighters in planning, replanning
and what Stack calls “data understand-
ing.” Two strategic MIW S&T program
goals drive efforts to align delivery of
technologies with operational needs, he
says. “They are to reduce the operational
timeline and reduce risk to the operating
forces,” Stack states. “Everything we do
contributes to these two goals, as they
are the foci of the operational MCM
community. Autonomy and unmanned
systems are key enablers, as they allow
for new capability as well as scalability to
create greater warfighting capacity.”
Favoring autonomy over man-in-
the-middle systems, Navy program-
mers are making headway in the devel-
opment of compatible swarm systems
that are becoming a foundational part
of the MCM. A driving force is that
no single system can complete the full
detect-to-engage sequence across the
full spectrum of needs, from the sur-
face to the seafloor to even buried in
the sea sediment, Stack adds.
One leading UUV Navy program
came under fire when the Defense
Department’s inspector general (IG)
issued a critical assessment of the Knifefish surface MCM UUV. Knifefish
developers failed to coordinate capability requirements with Navy LCS program managers, states the IG report
from November, leading to engineering cost overruns of about $2.3 million. The Navy is pushing ahead with
the platform, and testing aboard an
LCS is scheduled for this year. Future
improvements will focus on sensors and
propulsion.
Other initiatives within the Navy’s
MIW program office, which falls under
the Program Executive Office Littoral
Combat Ships portfolio, include the
Remote Multimission Vehicle (RMMV)
and the Common Unmanned Surface
Vehicle (CUSV), currently used for
mine warfare, hunting and neutral-
ization. Future capabilities aboard the
CUSV will include communications
relay and surveillance, counterpiracy
and antisubmarine warfare.
A major challenge researchers face
is accurate perception of broad swaths
of the maritime and undersea environments, given the highly dynamic
and uncertain nature of the ocean.
Other challenges include developing
advanced sensors, advanced machine
intelligence to better understand sensor data and advanced autonomy to
adapt sensor and platform behaviors to
improve perception, Stack lists.
The MCM community focuses its
work on sensor-related automation and
autonomy in three areas: environmentally adaptive automatic target recognition, whereby a machine can adapt
to changing, uncertain and challenging
undersea conditions; a machine’s ability to assess its own performance and
proficiency for a specific MCM mission;
and the interactive perception by which
machine intelligence, sensor configuration and platform behaviors can be
more tightly coupled and adjusted in
real time to optimize performance.
“This is critical as MCM is performed
by a team of unmanned and manned
platforms embedded in a human warf-ighter-based force structure,” Stack says.
“The machine must be capable of knowing when it is operating in a new or
unfamiliar environment where its proficiency is degraded such that it needs
human assistance.”
contact: Sandra Jontz,
sjontz@afcea.org
U.S. sailors from EODMU 1 perform
preoperational maintenance and
checks on their Remus Mk- 18 Mod 1
underwater unmanned vehicles as part
of a bilateral mine countermeasure
exercise involving U.S. and U.K. troops.
