Feature 5 | UNMANNED VEHICLES


DARPA pursues long-endurance unmanned ASW vessel concept


Northrop Grumman, QinetiQ North America and Science Applications International Corp (SAIC) have been awarded parallel contracts by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to explore the design of a novel ultra-long endurance unmanned surface vessel (USV) capable of tracking potentially hostile submarines for months at a time.


‘consumer’ of force structure. This has become an increasing concern to many forces, notably the US Navy, at a time when platform numbers are declining and qualitatively improving threat submarines continue to proliferate. It is in order to address this mismatch


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that DARPA is pursuing the concept of an ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) that could independently ‘track and trail’ quiet diesel-electric submarines for extended periods at a theatre or even global level. Its premise is that such assets could open up a whole new ‘game changing’ concept of operations for ASW, based on the assumption that a human would not be required to step on board the vessel at any point in the operations cycle. According to DARPA, the ACTUV platform would not


itself deploy a


wide-area search capability, relying instead on conventional assets – ships, submarines, helicopters and maritime patrol aircraſt – to provide an initial target cue. The ACTUV would then use a ‘novel ASW sensor’ to closely tail the contact through the course of ‘months-long’ deployments so as to prevent search assets from being tied up in intensive trail operations. Te fact that the platform is unmanned


opens up what DARPA characterises as “an unexplored design space…without constraint on structure, stability or crew support, in contrast to their significant impacts in conventional ship design”. In terms of ACTUV platform


characteristics and performance, DARPA has outlined the goal of a 3000km on-station mission radius (unrefuelled),


Warship Technology March 2011


nti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations have


long been recognised as a significant


DARPA envisages the ACTUV being used to track submarines remotely, without human intervention.


and the ability to perform a 30-day loiter followed by a 30-day trail mission at maximum energy. Other discriminators include “robust


propulsive overmatch,” suggesting a significant speed advantage over the


submerged submarine; superior


manoeuvrability; a turn rate advantage; the ability to support tracking over the duration of a target submarine’s deployment; and an explicit acceptance of ‘overt’ trail, so enabling the unrestricted use of active sonar and avoiding the requirement for expensive platform quietening. The


development


current ACTUV research, and


demonstration effort has set out to engineer a highly


autonomous unmanned experimental design, or ‘X-ship’, as the prototype of an independently deployed unmanned naval vessel operating under sparse remote supervisory control. Under Phase 1 of the ACTUV


programme, DARPA has awarded three contractor teams funding to study the ‘solution space’ through concept exploration, system architecture, system concept and performance evaluation studies. Northrop Grumman Undersea Systems, QinetiQ North America Technology Solutions Group and SAIC’s Intelligence, Security, and Technology Group have each received contracts worth about US$2 million each. A further three risk-reduction contracts,


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