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54 Insight | UUVs or amphibious vessel to counter an adversary’s anti-access/area denial missions, as well as deploy kinetic and non-kinetic weapon systems. In October 2017, Lockheed Martin was awarded a $43.2m contract to supply the Navy with a series of prototype vehicles with the capability to interface with the mission payloads mentioned above. Frank Drennan, director of business development for submersibles and autonomous systems at Lockheed Martin, says the combination of intensifying threats and emerging technological advances suggests a “vibrant, long-term market for AUVs”. He says, “Our customers keep telling us that the demand on naval forces involved in undersea tasks is increasing at unprecedented rates. This creates an imperative for the use of AUVs to cost- effectively increase undersea capability and capacity. “Indeed, technology improvements have increased the functionality of unmanned systems while reducing their cost. “We see evidence of the impact of these factors in clearer concepts of operation involving the use of AUVs, organisational and resource alignment, and the highest level of support to date for AUV programmes of record.” Drennan adds that a future operating environment that is more focused on the use of AUVs continues to be considered by many customers, including the US Navy, regarding “current and future missions”. This, he says, features a trade-off analysis by Lockheed Martin engineers in areas including autonomy, speed, endurance, stealth and payload capacity in order to identify the optimal areas of growth for AUV technology. “We believe that endurance, autonomy, energy, reliability and data transfer are the biggest factors influencing the tactical utility of AUVs for the foreseeable future,” he says. “As these factors are mitigated through a combination of technology, engineering and operational concepts, we believe the confidence in AUVs to operate for extended periods of time without frequent human interaction will invigorate the use of AUVs for significant numbers of missions.” As part of its ongoing investment in endurance and energy dependency of UUV technology, Lockheed Martin has also made an undisclosed investment in Ocean Aero, which specialises in environmentally powered AUVs. Ocean Aero has developed the wind- and solar-powered Submaran S10 unmanned platform, which is capable of operating in surface and sub-surface environments for months at a time (examined in detail in UST 9, August/ September 2016). The aim of tie-up is to look at providing ‘next generation’ UUV missions solutions using the technology. UUVs have suffered by comparison with unmanned craft in other realms for some years now, but research into new technologies and capabilities look set to secure a long-term and widening range of mission sets for them. February/March 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology Lockheed Martin has signed a deal with Ocean Aero, which makes the Submaran S10, to investigate how to take UUV autonomy and self-sufficiency forward (Courtesy of Ocean Aero)