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home > November/December, 2007 issue > article
Navy researchers envision sea base sentries
By Caron Golden
Special to Defense Systems
The military wants unmanned vehicles to protect Joint Forces assets at sea bases by 2015. The vision would make sea bases off-shore sanctuaries for aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships and destroyers, for example.
These unmanned vehicle sentries would consist of sensors, weapons and controls to enable communications, navigation, support and repair. They would be able to identify potential threats and neutralize them.
To achieve this goal, collaboration is critical. Because of the size of sea bases, which might have a perimeter of 100 to 200 nautical miles, a single asset or platform, no matter how sophisticated, can’t provide complete protection, said Gary Bullock, program manager of the Unmanned Systems unit at the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Crane Division.
In addition, autonomy is a must: Sentry nodes must be able to work together independent of human interaction. “Limited manpower and the need for long-dwell intelligence surveillance reconnaissance demands that the [sentry] be capable of collaborative autonomy to maintain the effectiveness of the shipboard operator/warfighter,” Bullock said.
Meanwhile, this project is still in the conceptual stages, and many of the specific components have not been identified.
So far, stakeholders have agreed that the project will include autonomous vehicles of all types — unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles and eventually unmanned ground vehicles, although the latter has not yet been a focus.
“Beyond that, the specifics of the platforms have not been defined,” said Lawrence Schuette, director of innovation at the Office of Naval Research. “We will be looking at requirements for various missions and tasks and identify vehicle characteristics based on those requirements.” Unmanned technologies will provide some concepts for consideration, in addition to research from the Navy’s FORCEnet program, industry, academic institutions and various ONR programs, Bullock said. But “there is nothing even approaching the complexity and capability envisioned” for the sentry program. Also, the technical challenges of this system-of-systems concept are tremendous. Schuette noted several of them: “How will we create the endurance necessary to keep the unmanned platforms on station for extended periods of time? How do we develop the command, control and communications of a large number of unmanned platforms? How do we establish the level of autonomy necessary for such a system? How do we develop the payloads necessary for the missions to be accomplished?”
“There is work going on in each of these areas and we will be leveraging that as appropriate,” he said. “Finally, the integration of these technology components will be a significant challenge.”
The researchers’ goal is to achieve Technology Readiness Level 6 by 2015 — testing a representative model or prototype in a relevant environment.
But that’s not an easy goal, Schuette said. “There will likely be significant variability to this, however, in the sense that certain components of the [sentry] system may mature sooner and other components may mature later.
In the meantime, Bullock said, researchers are planning a round of demonstrations that he thinks will start in May or June.
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