Teledyne Marine and industry partners conduct maritime demonstration during ANTX
(Photo: Teledyne Marine)
During the 2018 Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) from Aug. 29 to 31, Teledyne Marine and its industry partners showcased an Autonomous, System of Systems approach to expeditionary Mine-Countermeasures (MCM) using multi domain unmanned assets.
Teledyne Marine has provided a description of the demonstration.
The demonstration, which included multiple vehicles and several companies, begins with a Power Docks Blue Isles Autonomous Power Microgrid platform simulating providing power to all vehicles. The exercise starts with a Teledyne Oceanscience Z-Boat 1800 RP ASV performing a "bathymetric and LiDAR survey" of the basin.
Following that, a Planck Aerosystems Shearwater UAS conducts surface surveillance for both object avoidance and threat mitigation for the Z-Boat, and then a Teledyne Gavia AUV performs a search-classify-map sidescan survey of the basin.
Running on the Gavia AUV, the Teledyne CARIS-Onboard then performs "mosaicing of the sidescan data" in near real time while Charles River Analytics' Onboard ATR software—also running in near real time on the Gavia AUV—uses "advanced image processing algorithms" to not only analyze the CARIS mosaics, but also perform Automatic Target Recognition (ATR).
The coordinates of a mine-like object are passed to Marine Advanced Research's WAM-V ASV, which then moves to the provided coordinates and deploys a Teledyne SeaBotix vLBV300 ROV equipped with a mock-up of a mine disposal system. Finally, Greensea Systems' inertial navigation and supervised autonomy, maneuvers the ROV to the waypoint with minimal operator assistance, visualizes the target, and simulates neutralization.
"Following the theme of "Human Machine Interaction", Teledyne and its partners demonstrated how today's Mine Countermeasures activities can safely be performed by multi domain assets incorporating much needed autonomy," explains Teledyne Marine System's Vice President of Engineering, Bob Melvin.
"The thirty-two-minute exercise was an amazing display of using autonomous vehicles for mine detection and clearance in a small harbor while keeping the warfighter out of harm's way."
