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49 The state of play Technologically, the more traditional concepts of UUV operations centred on MCM missions continue to rely on a mix of ROVs and AUVs in small form factors. However, as the market continues to develop, novel technologies are beginning to open up new areas of potential mission sets in the defence and security realm as well as the commercial domain, as industry seeks to extend UUV capabilities yet further. According to robotics and automation specialist ECA Group, customers are looking to exploit UUV technology in order to enhance their capabilities across new functions, including persistent surveillance in harsh environments. The company points out that new technology could help reduce the logistics burden and costs of operations by replacing manned vessels with UUVs (integrated with USVs and UAVs). That would minimise the risk associated with personnel operating them as well as reducing costs, it says. “The unmanned market is evolving very quickly. But the biggest challenges at the moment are navigational precision, onboard intelligence, endurance and the comms systems. “Defence and security customers in particular are looking to acquire a complete and integrated toolkit of UUV technologies, providing ease of use, deployment and exploitation.” The focus is therefore on designing and developing enhancements to UUV platforms and subsystems to improve vehicle autonomy, data quality and processing speed, as well as onboard intelligence such as automatic target recognition (ATR). UUVs do not however represent a ‘one-stop shop’ for government and commercial partners in the maritime environment. Instead they should form part of a wider, integrated system comprising manned and unmanned air, land and maritime vehicles. An example of this is the UMIS unmanned MCM system, which is a collaborative group of surface and underwater robots with integrated command and control. It is designed to reduce manpower requirements and therefore costs. Manned mine-hunting vessels must not only minimise their magnetic signature (which can interfere with the search capabilities of sonar payloads), they also need to choose between hull-mounted sonar payloads that offer either long- range acoustic sensor and low resolution, or short-range acoustic sensor with high resolution. There is not yet a single system that gives both long range and high resolution. Sonar expert Dr Marc Pinto backs this up by saying, “The physics of sonar dictates that you can’t have both range and resolution. With conventional mine- hunters, you either have to approach and manoeuvre as close as possible to a mine to get good classification – which is risky and time-consuming – or the vessel stays far from the target, leading to a low resolution and a high probability of missing some mines, which is also risky.” The UMIS system therefore relies on a series of integrated platforms to provide both range and resolution, with the potential to operate a series of AUVs in a ‘swarm’ configuration. UUVs | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2018 ECA Group’s A-9 AUV can be operated in a standalone configuration as well as part of a wider system comprising UUVs, USVs and manned vessels (Courtesy of ECA Group)