Using technology originally designed for the Mars Rover, the Office of Naval Research has developed a kit that can be added to any boat and used to make a swarm of autonomous boats.
Navy officials see the new capability as a force multiplier to make the other guy work harder to get through our technology without putting Sailors at risk.
“It’s a great capability to relieve the Sailor of the dirty, the dangerous, the dull missions out there,” said Rick Simon, the Demonstration Director with Spatial Integrated Systems, one of the contractors working on the project. “Instead of having four patrols boats out there with four or five Sailors on each boat, you have one or two Sailors sitting at an operations center controlling four or five boats.”
The robot boats are inexpensive and expendable. The technology, called CARACaS (Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing) can be put into a transportable kit and installed on almost any boat. The boats can choose their own path, network, then intercept a contact, transmitting situational awareness data back to the control center the whole time.
The new mission tests is geared for harbor defense. The boats can use cooperative decision making between the boats to handle business in deterring and detaining possible threats.
Let me introduce myself. I am a bit of a conflict junkie. I am fascinated by war and warfare, assassination, personal protection and weaponry ranging from spud guns and flame throwers to thermonuclear bombs and Soviet-trained Ebola monkeys. In short, if it’s violent or a tool to create violence it is kind of my thing.
I have written a few thousand articles on the dry encyclopedia side for such websites as Guns.com, University of Guns, Outdoor Hub, Tac-44, History Times, Big Game Hunter, Glock Forum, Firearms Talk.com, and Combat Forums; as well as for print publications like England Expects, and Strike First Strike Fast. Several magazines such as Sea Classics, Military Historian and Collector, Mississippi Sportsman and Warship International have carried my pieces. Additionally I am on staff as a naval consultant and writer for Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine.
Currently I am working on several book projects including an alternative history novel about the US-German War of 1916, and a biography of Southern gadfly and soldier of fortune Bennett Doty. My first novel, about the coming zombie apocalypse was released in 2012 by Necro Publications and can be found at Amazon.com as was the prequel, Chimera-44. I am currently working on book two of that series: "Pirates of the Zombie Coast."
In my day job I am a contractor for the U.S. federal government in what could best be described as the ‘Force Protection’ field. In this I am an NRA-certified firearms, and less-than-lethal combat instructor.
The Mechanix of Auto, Aviation, Military...pert near anything I feel relates to mechanical things, places, events or whatever I happen to like. Even non-mechanical artsy-fartsy stuff.
