Maritime Awards Society of Canada

U.S. Navy researchers are developing an autonomous submarine that gathers military intelligence information in coastal waters and harbors by deploying and operating small unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) as a distributed, collaborative suite of electronic sensors.

The Manta UUV, shown above, was developed by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center as a potential UUV mothership

Officials of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Va., awarded a $2.5 million contract to Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) in San Diego on 20 Nov. to develop a prototype UUV mothership able to deploy small surveillance UUVs in littoral waters.

Doing the unmanned vehicle work will be engineers in the SAIC facilities in Lynnwood, Wash.

The ONR contract to SAIC is part of a program called Autonomous UUV Delivery and Communication (AUDAC), first funded in 2008 to develop UUV host capabilities by demonstrating a UUV to carry and deploy small, information-collecting underwater drones.

SAIC experts will design a demonstration in which a host UUV carries, deploys, and recovers smaller UUVs, and collects intelligence sensor data from the small UUVs.

(source: Military and Aerospace Electronics)