64 Show report | Xponential 2024 military 13) to autonomous operation. The 103 m, 2,500 t, 35 kt (or more with a light load) catamarans of the Spearhead class can carry a 600 short ton payload 1,200 nm. Apalachicola is the Navy’s largest ship with autonomous capabilities and it completed more than 2,500 nm of autonomous operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 2023. “We did a series of tests that gradually increased in complexity from simply turning the autonomy system on to giving the ship full missions under autonomous control,” he says. “The culmination of that was a seven-day run around the Gulf of Mexico up into the Straits of Florida because we had to go to a place like that to find enough traffic to stress the system.” While a supervisory team was on board, the ship operated with no one at the controls for more than 90% of the time. “There were just two interventions over a week-long trial, which is minimal,” Schmieman says. Austal USA is one of six primes under contract to design the US Navy’s future, large uncrewed surface vessel (LUSV), for which the company is putting an engine/ genset through a 720-hour test in a cell in Utah, during which no maintenance is allowed. To meet the Navy’s desire for open architecture computing, machinery control systems are likely to move away from programmable logic controllers (PLCs) towards the kind of edge computing that characterises the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices, Schmieman says. “We will go as far as we can in that direction. It might not be completely like the iPhone example that the Navy likes to use, but it can certainly move to a more modular, flexible, open system that you can put on a greater range of ships,” he explains. Schmieman also identified damage response/damage control as a capability gap in autonomy for large ships, partly driven by regulations mandating a human presence. “A perfect example is firefighting systems. It would be pretty easy to automate them, but there is a little nuance to how you would take the person out of the loop,” he says. “That’s one of those gaps that we want to address in the near future.” Hidden Level presented its UAV detection, and airspace management and protection services, based on complementary passive radio frequency (RF) direction finding and passive radar technologies. Direction finding relies on antennas and receivers that detect and locate RF emissions from UAVs, while passive radar exploits signals of opportunity available in the operating environment. Hidden Level’s system can operate in both modes. Naturally, these technologies have both civil and military applications. The company provides an airspacemonitoring service (AMS), a data-as-aservice solution for broad area critical infrastructure protection and public safety. Hidden Level makes wide-band passive direction-finding systems that are used in this specific application for detecting drones in a given airspace, says a company representative. A commercial solution would involve the installation of our sensors around an area of interest, which could be a city or a football stadium, for example. Then the company would provide a data feed that the customer can use to determine what type of drone activity is happening, he adds. Hidden Level has discussed military use with representatives of NATO countries. There is a strong application for base defence and also for mobile systems. For example, it can provide a manoeuvre August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Cellula Robotics’ Solus-XR long-endurance AUV uses autonomy technology from Metron, enabling complex covert missions lasting months (Image courtesy of Cellula Robotics)
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