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Maritime Autonomous Systems in the Royal Navy


Commander Peter J. Pipkin Fleet Robotics Officer, Maritime Capability


It would seem almost certain that a future Royal Navy will deliver significant areas of capability through unmanned and autonomous systems. These technologies are already proliferating in our everyday lives, in the workplace and the home. They offer disruptive and transformational opportunities to a multitude of tasks, from self‐navigating vehicles, be they cars, aircraft or boats, to autonomous algorithms processing big data at speeds


and efficiencies that people couldn’t hope to replicate. They enable better access to dangerous environments and they can work continuously for hours, days, weeks or even months or years in an increasing number of systems. All of these attributes


have the potential to deliver varying degrees of efficiency and effectiveness into Royal Navy operations. The challenging questions are, which operations, to what breadth and how soon?


To try and answer some of these questions the Royal Navy hosted the Unmanned Warrior demonstrations in October 2016. Unmanned Warrior was a collaborative event conceived, planned and delivered by Defence, Industry and Academia that saw over 40 participating organisations operating approximately 50 systems in the realistic and demanding environment of the Joint Warrior exercise programme. Remote and Autonomous Systems (RAS) were deployed in the air, on the surface and under the water across a spectrum of operational tasking in order to rapidly develop a better understanding of where MAS offers credible capability choices for the Royal Navy.


The breadth of demonstrations at Unmanned Warrior spanned a number of maturity levels. At the higher technology readiness levels the aim was to investigate, understand and develop where


Royal Navy specialists monitoring squad‐based, collaborative, autonomous vehicles conducting MCM


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Society of Maritime Industries Annual Review 2017


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