ARTICLE

December 2002

Former Classroom Vessel Becomes Floating Navy Lab

by Harold Kennedy

The Office of Naval Research—the scientific arm of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps—has converted a small, aging training ship into a platform for testing new technologies intended for the fleet.

The vessel—known as the Afloat Lab, YP679—is a 108 foot-long wooden-hulled yard patrol craft, built in the mid-1980s by Peterson Builders, of Sturgeon Bay, Wis. Since the early days of World War II, the Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Md., has employed such craft to teach midshipmen the arts of navigation and seamanship.

After the academy retired the craft in 1998, the ONR decided to bring it back to life. Its mission now would be to see how promising new technologies perform at sea—subject to salt, wind, extreme temperatures, vibration and the motion of waves—before they actually are installed on ships in the fleet.

The reason for ONR’s interest in the Afloat Lab is the same one that made the vessel useful for midshipmen to learn the ropes, explained the program manager, Capt. Sharon Elaine.

“It has the same machinery, electronics and navigation systems as larger Navy ships,” said Elaine. “That makes it an ideal platform for testing new technologies for shipboard use.”

Elaine is a Navy reservist on two years of active duty. In civilian life, a computer software engineer from California’s Silicon Valley, she is a 22-year veteran of the Navy, who has served on a number of combat ships. She received this assignment, she said, because her superiors at ONR “know I love ships.”

For about a year after the Afloat Lab was declared excess property, it remained docked at Naval Station Annapolis, just across the Severn River from the academy. During that period, “a lot of stuff got pilfered—or perhaps I should say ‘borrowed,’” said Joseph F. Mearman, senior electrical engineer for Anteon Corporation, which operates the Afloat Lab under contract to ONR.

“They were going to throw the boat away,” he said. “We recommended that ONR take it over.”

ONR agreed to do so, using a $1.5 million congressional plus-up in its 1999 budget to refurbish the craft. The work included repairs to the hull and replacing “a lot of sea-water valves, which were in a very poor condition,” Mearman said.

The work, however, went quickly, he said. “In less than two months, we were sailing laps out here in the Severn.” Operating the Afloat Lab costs about $1 million per year, he said.

The vessel has been outfitted with the latest, cutting-edge technology, he said. For instance, a self-healing communications network has been installed, using what is called survivable automation technology, or SAT. It is designed so that if one link is damaged, other parts of the system remain functional, Mearman said.

The Afloat Lab takes its nickname, the “Starfish,” from this technology, noted Elaine. “A starfish functions without a brain, relying instead on radial nerves running the length of each ray and connecting to other radial nerves via a nerve ringing the body,” she said. Each starfish tentacle, she explained, is capable of acting as the “leader” when the starfish moves.

The Afloat Lab’s SAT operates under the same principle, Elaine said. It allows vital ship systems to be restored automatically after a communications break.

In all, the vessel has 185 sensors and actuators, controlled by 83 computers, located from stem to stern, Mearman said.

A high-resolution, 360-degree camera has been mounted on the craft’s mast, providing views in all directions. This ability can be particularly useful in protecting ships against terrorist attacks, such as the one that disabled the USS Cole, Mearman explained.

“This camera can scan the horizon, looking for suspicious activity, and it can zoom in across a harbor or along the dock to get close enough to reveal actual facial features,” he said.

Improving Situational Awareness
ONR is working with the camera’s manufacturer—RemoteReality, of Westborough, Mass.—and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, in Newport, R.I., to adapt it for submarine periscopes.

“While the Navy has used periscope technology for a long time, we have found that most periscopes have a very limited field of view,” said Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, chief of naval research. “RemoteReality’s technology could provide us with a high-resolution system to observe the submarine’s entire 360-degree periphery and improve our situational awareness.”

A head-worn, high-resolution personal computer system, made by Microvision Inc., of Bothell, Wash., presents images and information to the user on a virtual 17-inch display. The system, known as Nomad, enables hands-free access to information, such as diagrams, instrumentation, maintenance records, moving maps and interactive training manuals.

Nomad features full, daylight readability, “allowing users to view high-contrast images even in the most challenging ambient lighting conditions,” according to Rob Sainsbury, Microvision director of government business development.

With this device, the captain could steer a ship from anywhere on the vessel, Elaine said. He or she wouldn’t have to be necessarily at the helm. Also, she said, crewmembers could communicate with each other from anywhere within the ship.

In addition to those technologies that are more or less a permanent part of the Afloat Lab’s equipment, other projects are brought on board temporarily for experimentation and demonstration. Typically, they are set up in the craft’s combat information center.

When the vessel visited Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, earlier this year, it had aboard:

• An unmanned underwater vehicle, called RoboLobster, designed to search shallow waters for sea mines.
• A hand-held detector that identifies the presence of dangerous chemical agents.
• A fuel cell that turns sea sediment into a power source that may be able to replace batteries for many naval functions.

On another cruise—to Washington, D.C.—the Afloat Lab demonstrated a “Smart Valve” system, which uses embedded sensors, microprocessors, communications hardware and automatic-control software to detect and isolate ruptures in ship fluid systems. The system is “an essential first step in conducting effective damage control with fewer people,” according to Eric Runnerstrom, a spokesman for the developer, MPR Associates Inc., of Alexandria, Va. If one valve fails, the next one upstream will close to restore pressure, Runnerstrom said.

There’s been no shortage of technologies for the Afloat Lab to try out, Mearman said. “Every six months, it’s something new,” he said. Recently, ONR and the Naval Research Laboratory have considered putting sensors in the craft’s engines to monitor oil quality. “We want to know exactly when to change the oil,” Elaine said.

Many of the experiments and demonstrations conducted on the Afloat Lab could be done in laboratories ashore, Mearman conceded. “But rather than continue to look at blinking lights in some lab, we decided that, sooner or later, we needed to try this stuff out onboard a ship at sea, where the Navy is going to use it,” he said. “The whole point of ONR research is to transfer new technology to the fleet.”

The Afloat Lab is ideal for this purpose, Mearman asserted. It has all of the operating systems of a much larger ship, but it is small, with a crew of six engineers, he said. When the craft was used to teach midshipmen, he explained, it typically had a crew more than twice as large.

The Afloat Lab can operate close to shore, in the Severn or the nearby Chesapeake. With 437 horsepower, twin-propeller Detroit Diesel engines, it also can take on long cruises, sailing for 1,400 nautical miles for five days without refueling.

The Afloat Lab’s pilothouse is equipped with Pathfinder radar, Fishfinder sonar and Chartplotter GPS-assisted navigation system, all made by Raymarine Limited, headquartered in the United Kingdom. Until its divestiture in 2001, Raymarine was a part of the Raytheon Company, of Lexington, Mass.

There are two radar systems, Mearman explained. “We have built in a redundancy, so that in case we have a problem with one, we have a backup.” The Chartplotter includes a world map, enabling the little vessel to plot a course to any place on the globe.

Shipboard Automation
A major focus of the Afloat Lab’s work is on shipboard automation, because of the Navy’s interest in downsizing crews. The concept is quite controversial within the service, Mearman said.

“If you told a present-day captain that you were going to take 200 sailors off his ship, he wouldn’t like it,” he said. “I don’t think you could do it with a ship in the fleet today. I don’t think that’s going to happen—not yet.”

Some naval officers remain dubious about the concept of replacing sailors with computers since 1997, when the USS Yorktown suffered a failure of computer systems installed as part of the Navy’s Smart Ship project. Smart Ship is a system that computerizes many aspects of a vessel’s operations, requiring a smaller crew. The failure left the Yorktown dead in the water for a couple of hours.

Navy officials, however, dismiss the failure as a temporary glitch. The computers enabled the Yorktown—an Aegis missile cruiser—to reduce its crew size by 10 percent and save more than $2.8 million a year, they said. Smart Ship technology now has been installed on a total of five cruisers.

Future Navy ships are likely to have even greater crew reductions. Plans call for the DD(X) class of surface combat ships, now being developed, to have crews of 125, rather than the 350 or so assigned to present-day destroyers. The Littoral Surface Craft—Experimental (LSC-X), a logistics ship that ONR would like to design specifically to operate in coastal waters—also would have a small crew.

One concern that Mearman said that he often hears is how much training is required to operate all of this high-tech equipment. “The question I get all the time is, ‘Do crew members have to be PhDs to use this stuff?’”

The answer, he said, is, “No.” Most of the equipment is “pull and plug,” he said. “If something goes wrong with it, you just unplug it and replace it,” he said.

To help the general public to get better acquainted with these technologies, ONR is sending the Afloat Lab to visit major U.S. ports. In addition to Baltimore, Washington and Annapolis, the craft has visited New York City, Philadelphia and Norfolk. In New York, earlier this year, the Afloat Lab showed off robots used in post-9/11 recovery operations at the World Trade Center.

The visits are apparently popular. In Washington, the Afloat Lab attracted more than 700 visitors, including 23 congressional staff members, many federal employees and military personnel, and students from the National Defense University.

ONR hopes eventually to expand the visits to include ports along the Southeast, Gulf of Mexico and perhaps up the Mississippi River. With its small size and a draft of only eight feet, Elaine noted, the Afloat Lab can reach locations that are out of reach for larger Navy ships.

“It’s a great platform to showcase Navy research,” she said.

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