Unmanned Systems Technology 028 | ecoSUB Robotics AUVs I ECUs focus I Space vehicles insight I AMZ Driverless gotthard I InterDrone 2019 report I ATI WAM 167-BB I Video systems focus I Aerdron HL4 Herculift

21 “It was clear to me that autonomy was going to be increasingly important to the future of the marine industry, so I jumped at the chance to work for a navy contractor located in Groton, Connecticut.” The work involved designing and developing ASVs and UUVs for the Office of Naval Research (ONR). “We were doing things that hadn’t been done before, and I enjoyed being part of a group of software developers and multi- discipline engineers tasked with pulling integrated systems together,” he says. He worked with teams from other companies on designing the Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, the Low Visibility Craft (LVC) – an autonomous conversion of an 11 m RHIB – and a handful of custom UUVs and tow bodies for the ONR. His own focus in these projects was on composites, propulsion, payload integration and naval architecture. “The RHIB conversion was my favourite,” he says. “The physical boat had been in service for years before we got it. It was beat up. It had been dropped from airplanes; we’d find weathered 50-calibre shell casings buried in it. It had served our troops and there was something nostalgic about it. So we designed its ASV conversion to support multi-domain missions and UUV husbandry for mine countermeasures.” Blitz development He describes working on all three vehicles within a short period as an intense ‘blitz’ of development that included smaller vehicles and ancillary equipment to support testing. Intended to be launched from a boat over the horizon from a target shoreline, the LVC was designed to approach on the surface before flooding ballast tanks so that most of it would be under the water to minimise its visible profile. The LVC would then launch small UUVs for mine countermeasures, obstacle detection and targeting. It had a central bay for a tethered UUV and two lateral sponsons for launch and recovery of free-swimming vehicles. “As part of testing the LVC, we created our own UUVs to use as test platforms. Some of the equipment we needed for them either wasn’t commercially Geoff Douglass | In conversation I have always been fascinated with design and how it moves people, for example how a vintage Corvette can turn heads Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2019 SeaRobotics’ SR-Surveyor M1.8 is a catamaran ASV developed for high-resolution hydrographic and terrestrial mapping (Courtesy of SeaRobotics) The HYCAT has been developed for water quality data acquisition. It uses control software closely integrated with survey software (Courtesy of SeaRobotics)