Unmanned Underwater Vehicles: Swarming Capabilties

Hi all,
Been back on the "books" the past week or so, fetched another article out sticking NATO in the regular searches, from Oct.15th:

https://www.militaryaerospace.com/unmanned/article/14068665/unmanned-underwater-vehicles-uuv-artificial-intelligence

From the article:
Genghis italics included.
"U.S. autonomous undersea programs

The 2020 Pentagon budget request cites advances of potential adversaries in asking for major funding increases for autonomous weapons programs. Requests include a ten-fold increase in spending on large unmanned surface vessels by the Navy and more than 50 percent more for Army robotics development. The requests total $3.7 billion on unmanned systems across the services, plus another $900 million on AI."

$3.7 Billion coming out of the coffers for unmanned systems via the Pentagon.
It gets better . . .

"UUV development programs

By far the most active in autonomous, AI-driven platform development and deployment, the Navy already has awarded $43 million in contracts to Boeing Defense, Space & Security in Huntington Beach, Calif., and Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems in Riviera Beach, Fla., for extra-large unmanned undersea vehicles (XLUUVs).

Boeing will build four Orca XLUUVs, based on their Echo Voyager diesel-electric submersible. The 51-foot Orca has a range of 6500 nautical miles and can perform several combat missions, including anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare.

Mine warfare is another area where AI submersibles represent major technological advances in using intelligent collaborative autonomy to enable a group of autonomous UUVs to conduct the complex operations needed to survey and clear an underwater mine field. Many nations — friend and foe — have large stockpiles of such mines, which provide a cheap and easily deployable way to block access to ports, harbors, and shipping routes.

Thales is among those working on anti-mine autonomous UUVs under a program called “Explainable and Trustable Artificial Intelligence,” designed to enable manned and unmanned systems to make informed decisions in military applications.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are being designed to address significant challenges in intelligent control in collecting simultaneous data points from a large ocean volume as part of a coordinated mine sweep. Those include automated planning and replanning, context-sensitive reasoning, unanticipated event handling, inter-agent communication, autonomous organization, and reorganization of multi-autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) systems and task allocation.

Adding autonomous AI-controlled submarines to the Navy’s combat fleets, however, is expected to provide political as well as technological challenges.

New challenges

The General Dynamics Knifefish UUV is used for mine countermeasures and surveillance of the sea floor.For example, one issue that could hamper the Pentagon’s plans for AI-driven submarines is the need to establish ethical guidelines for their use — something neither the Chinese nor the Russians are likely to let get in the way.

The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board has requested public and professional input on developing a “set of principles for developing, testing and deploying” AI systems, but how those would be integrated into ongoing and future developments is unclear.

One undersea AI goal involves swarming capabilities, in which several autonomous vessels team with each other, as well as with manned submarines, surface vessels, and aircraft. One such vessel is SwarmDiver, manufactured by Aquabotix Technology Corp. in Fall River, Mass. The SwarmDiver test vehicle can dive as deep as 600 feet while working in synch with other UUVs submersibles.

“The swarming algorithm allows vehicles to communicate with each other to make decisions as a group. This allows SwarmDiver to quickly and accurately self-arrange in various swarm formations, as well as dive simultaneously to collect synoptic data sets,” according to Aquabotix.

Pentagon research and acquisition procedures also are being changed to reflect the rapid evolution of AI technology and undersea applications. The Other Transaction Authority was created to speed up the prototype permitting process, making it more flexible and efficient to move new technologies from the lab to the fleet as quickly as possible. Under the old process, a UUV would be obsolete by the time its requirements were laid out.

“This will streamline priorities,” Sen. Jack Reed D-RI, ranking member on the Senate Armed Service Committee, told the Middletown, RI-based Undersea Technology Innovation Consortium. “We’ve got to be quicker, faster, and tap into small business innovation.”

Among the Pentagon’s growing body of research is the Defense Science Board’s Task Force on Counter Autonomy. A committee of civilian experts, the task force is assessing near- and long-term U.S. counter-autonomy capabilities on land, at sea, in the air, and in space and cyberspace."


Cite any reason you like Aquabotix will fail.
Pentagon is spending big in Aquabotix backyard for 2020+.
Thales wants some, naturally.
I expect an acquisition of Aquabotix, by Thales (as our partner in mine disposal/detection) before shit gets "hot" between NATO and SCO.

And we get to be those C*%nt's that profit from war.

All IMO

GLATH