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October 2005

No Crews Required: Unmanned Vessels Hit the Waves

By Harold Kennedy

The Navy is experimenting with a new pair of sleek-looking unmanned surface vehicles designed to deploy from on its future Littoral Combat Ship—a small, fast vessel being designed for coastal warfare.

The two boats, which were built by the Maritime Applied Physics Corporation, of Baltimore, Md., were on display at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems’ symposium in Baltimore, Md. They are being tested at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Md., by the Office of Naval Research, the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Carderock Division and the Naval Sea Systems Command’s program executive office for ships.

“We’ve been doing launching and recovery,” said Scott Littlefield, science and technology director for ONR and PEO-Ships. “The Navy is still experimenting with USVs. Everybody agrees the LCS needs a small family of them. The question is: How many?”

The LCS can carry as many as five USVs. Its modular design will permit interchangeable mission packages, allowing the ship to be reconfigured, as necessary, for antisubmarine, mine or surface-warfare missions.

The first ship of the class, currently under construction at the Marinette Marine shipyard, in Marinette, Wis., is scheduled for delivery in late 2006.

The two MAPC craft, painted a gray and black camouflage to blend in with a maritime environment, were not part of the original design for the LCS, said MAPC President Mark S. Rice. “The Spartan [Scout] 11-meter unmanned [rigid-hull inflatable boat] was specified.”

The Scout was developed by Integrated Maritime Platforms International Inc. of Silverdale, Wash., as a 2002 Defense Department advanced concept technology project. It can be armed with a .50 caliber machine gun, video cameras and other sensors.

MAPC set out to “to bracket the Spartan’s capabilities,” to produce two boats that could do things that the Spartan couldn’t do, Rice said.

One of the MAPC craft, the High Speed Unmanned Sea Surface Vessel, is a 35-foot hydrofoil, with a top speed of more than 40 knots in heavy seas. It is designed to operate in sea-state 4 waters, with six to eight-foot waves, he said. Most such vessels become unstable in that sort of environment, he added.

The other MAPC platform, the 39-foot Tow Force Unmanned Sea Surface Vessel, is slower, moving no faster than just above 20 knots. But it can tow up to 2,500 pounds, and it can carry up to 8,050 pounds in payload and fuel.

“The Navy has a lot of little unmanned boats, but they can’t carry large payloads,” said Will Sokol, a Carderock technical manager.

General Dynamics-Bath Iron Works, the prime contractor for one of the two teams competing to build the LCS, is expected to hold a competition later this month to decide which USVs to go on board its version of those ships, Littlefield said. “We expect to have these boats ready for that competition.”

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