Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV)
Abstract
The Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program has three primary goals: (1) to build and demonstrate an experimental unmanned vessel with beyond state-of-the-art platform performance based on clean sheet design for unmanned operation, (2) demonstrate the technical viability of operating autonomous unmanned ships at theater or global ranges under a sparse remote supervisory control model, and (3) leverage unique ACTUV characteristics to transition a game changing ASW capability to the Navy. By establishing the premise that a human is never intended to step on board at any point in the operational cycle, ACTUV concepts can take advantage of an unexplored design space that eliminates or modifies conventional ship design constraints such as internal arrangement, reserve buoyancy, and dynamic stability in order to achieve disproportionate speed, endurance, and payload fraction. The resulting unmanned naval vessels must possess sufficient situational awareness and autonomous behavior capability to operate in full compliance with the rules of the road and maritime law to support safe navigation for operational deployments spanning thousands of miles and months of time. When coupled with innovative sensor technologies, the ACTUV system provides a low cost unmanned system with a fundamentally different operational risk calculus that enables game changing capability to detect and track even the quietest diesel electric submarine threats. Key technical areas include unmanned naval vessel design methodologies, ship system reliability, high fidelity sensor fusion to provide an accurate world model for autonomous operation, novel application of sensors for ASW tracking, and holistic system integration due to unique optimization opportunities of the ACTUV system.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2013
- Source ID
- 8d9ae5e120a998d22ce252df5a2e0ae8
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- Root: TACTICAL TECHNOLOGY