Tag Archives: drone boat

The Port of Gulfport implemented ‘continuous autonomous subsea surveillance’ on May 1

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There is no secret that the Navy has often used undersea surveillance sonar such as the German-made Cerberus anti-diver set for years in sensitive areas such as strategic ports, NSYs, and homeports.

For instance, more than 20 years ago:

050815-N-1722M-026 Pascagoula, Miss. (Aug 15, 2005) – Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit One Two (EODMU-12) Det 10 prepare to guide the Cerberus Swimmer Detection System into the water at Naval Station Pascagoula during the Gulf Coast Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative 2005. The initiative is being held at the Port of Pascagoula in cooperation with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard, along with federal, state, and local agencies working together to enhance homeland security. U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Michael Moriatis (RELEASED)

Plus, there are regular harbor inspections and exercises by USCGR PSUs and USNR MIUWUs, not to mention state and local dive teams and UXO/EOD dets.

Now the ante has been quietly upped in the form of full-time AUSVs.

I’ve covered the Ocean Aero Triton, which is capable of sailing autonomously for 3 months on solar and wind power at speeds of up to 5 knots, several times in the past couple of years. I see them a lot as the company is based here in Gulfport.

Up she comes.

It seems the Triton is now also “on the job” in the port, basically making a baseline scan of the bottom and then repeating the grid to look for new items which would be interesting to take a closer look at to see if they are, well, an old refrigerator, or a sea mine.

 

Just taking my drone boat for a walk

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Just walking around the Gulfport harbor on the weekend– back when it was 70 degrees just a week ago– and spied this, now increasingly familiar, scene: an Ocean Aero Triton Autonomous Underwater and Surface Vehicle (AUSV), with its recycled USCG 26ft RB-S chase boat (note the red showing through on the sides) and the replica of the old Ship Island lighthouse on the west horizon. The new (post-Katrina) Coast Guard station is to the left. 

(Photo by Chris Eger)

Ocean Aero is based at the port, nestled in among the banana boat facilities, and tests its production Triton AUSVs from the harbor before packing them up for delivery.

They typically run them 2 at a time, which leaves open the possibility of drone boat races? I think they should keep that in mind. I grew up with the submarine races in Pascagoula back when Ingalls was making Sturgeon-class hunter-killers and that was a blast.

Hauling wheat around Yemen will get you holed

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“The assessment at the moment is it was almost certainly non-state Yemen based actors firing a land-based missile or rocket at the vessel,” Major Tom Mobbs, head of intelligence and security with the European Union’s counter-piracy mission EU Navfor, told Reuters.

Damage to the Turkish-flagged bulk carrier Ince Inebolu after last weeks missile attack.

The Turkish flagged Ince Inebolu bulk carrier was damaged by an explosion on May 10, some 70 miles off the Red Sea port of Salif where it was due to deliver a 50,000-tonne cargo of Russian wheat. Likely culprits are the Houthis, who last month hit a Saudi oil tanker was off Yemen’s main port city of Hodeidah, suffering limited damage.

And of course, the Houthis have exchanged fire with both Gulf State and U.S. military vessels several times.

Drone boat suspected in attack on Saudi frigate

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As noted by Defense News:

The Houthi boat that attacked and hit a Saudi frigate Jan. 30 in the Red Sea, reported earlier as a suicide boat, was instead carried out by an unmanned, remote-controlled craft filled with explosives, the US Navy’s top officer in the Mideast said.

“Our assessment is that it was an unmanned, remote-controlled boat of some kind,” Vice Adm. Kevin Donegan, commander of the Bahrain-based US Fifth Fleet and head of US Naval Forces Central Command, told Defense News in an interview here Saturday.

The attack on the frigate Al Madinah appears to be the first confirmed use of the weapon which, Donegan said, represents a wider threat than that posed by suicide boats and shows foreign interests are aiding the Houthis.

Donegin is concerned “first that it is in the hands of someone like the Houthis. That’s not an easy thing to develop. There have been many terrorist groups that have tried to develop that, it’s not something that was just invented by the Houthis. There’s clearly support there coming from others, so that’s problematic.

“The second is the explosive boat piece — you don’t need suicide attackers to do a suicide-like attack. There are certain terrorists that do things and they get martyrs to go and do it. But there are many others that don’t want to martyr themselves in making attacks like that and that’s pretty much where the Houthis are. So it makes that kind of weaponry, which would normally take someone suicidal to use, now able to be used by someone who’s not going to martyr themselves.”

The unmanned boat was likely supplied by Iran, Donegan said.

More here.

Swarmboats, yeah, we got that

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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.

Demonstrated back in 2014, they escorted a boat through a narrow passage.

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.

(Originally appeared in my column at Guns.com)

Navy tests borg swarm of RHIBs

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In a move to proof of concept the idea that a transiting naval ship can be defended from potential small boat attacks, the Navy ran an excercise in which they used a baker’s dozen small craft to run interference for a surface ship on the move. While not revolutionary– it’s the concept of a carrier battle group in miniature– the fact that the small boats were all unmanned was.

From Navy Times

“The Arlington-based Office of Naval Research demonstrated the autonomous swarm boat technology over two weeks in August on the James River near Fort Eustis in Virginia — not far from one of the Navy’s largest fleet concentration areas. It said the Navy simulated a transit through a strait, just like the routine passage of U.S. warships through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

In the demonstrations, as many as 13 small unmanned patrol boats were escorting a high-value Navy ship. Then as many as eight of the self-guided vessels broke off and swarmed around a threat when a ship playing the part of an enemy vessel was detected, the office said, calling the demonstrations a success.”

An unmanned 11-meter rigid hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) from Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock operates autonomously in Newport News, Va. John F. Williams / Navy via AP

An unmanned 11-meter rigid hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) from Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock operates autonomously in Newport News, Va. John F. Williams / Navy via AP

 

While I cant see your typical tin can using something like this, ships with lots of deck and well space (gators, LCS, etc) could make good use of these in a deployed situation for sea control. Also, you could preposition flotillas of these floating drones in choke points and pirate held waters, with the sailors who are manning them either remotely linked in or circling above in a control aircraft (converted P-3?). Kinda neat overall.

More here.