www.maritimeindustries.org
How Marine Science and Technology is Innovating the Defence Sector
The marine science and technology sector covers a very broad segment of business interests. The products and services are diverse and in use through oil and gas, environmental monitoring,
Terry Sloane Managing Director, Planet Ocean Limited
research and defence. This is demonstrated by the variety of SMI’s member company’s activities and their approaches to innovation. Speaking with three of these companies; Autonaut, Chelsea Technology Group and SeeByte, we are
able to gain an insight into the scope of marine science and technology innovation and how they are using this innovation within the defence arena.
Each sector requires its own innovation and product development. Roy Wyatt of Autonaut who produce a wave powered autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) commented “Our innovation comes much more from the commercial side: oceanographic, environmental and scientific, with the realisation that this type of platform can gather long duration data sets without disturbing the natural habitat. Manned research ships automatically change the things they are measuring by their very presence and moored/tethered systems need to be serviced on site or collected.” These attributes are clearly exportable to defence applications where removal of the human from the environment or where an extremely quiet and low visibility presence is required.
However, there can be good crossover opportunities between different market sectors. As Justin Dunning of Chelsea Technologies says “CTG have been active within the defence sector for many years, initially adapting commercial sensors to address the unique requirements of underwater defence. These unique requirements have frequently driven innovation within many aspects of the design and manufacture of CTG underwater sensors.”
“The innovation drivers come directly from CTG customers who are looking to apply sensor technology into new applications which can call for improvements in sensor performance, reduction in cost of measurements or adapting new methods of measurement to challenge traditional techniques”.
26 Society of Maritime Industries Annual Review 2017
SeeByte also do not see direct development just from one user group, Chris Haworth explains that “SeeByte’s autonomy engine, Neptune, has provided the bases for the software systems for both oceanographic and military demonstrations. SeeByte has been continually innovating in response to market and customer requirements. Our core capabilities can be extended and adapted to fit custom user needs, and as a result innovation is an‐going feature”.
Chris adds that “In the defence sphere, SeeByte demonstrated using Neptune to provide new autonomous capabilities for un‐ manned underwater vehicles (UUVs) in collaboration with several international partners as part of Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP) and at Unmanned Warrior. Autonomy architectures were used to enable multi‐vehicle collaboration and inter‐fleet communications (subsurface, surface and air), as well as autonomous solutions for Mine Counter Measures.”
Roy at Autonaut / Seiche said “At Seiche Water Technology Group, our digital thin line array was originally developed for a European navy as a high performance, highly configurable and very low noise system for the most advanced forms of passive acoustic monitoring.”
He adds that “We are eagerly waiting to see how defence is going to move forwards with UxVs and how they want to use them. I think this will be more pull from them than push from us, particularly in the maritime surface and UW sectors.”
When examining the strength of the defence sector and developments in the immediate future, Justin remarked “Over the
Submarine showing CTG subpack
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40