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US Navy Is Planning To Launch a Squadron of Underwater Drones By 2020 (robohub.org)

Posted by samzenpus on from the under-the-sea dept.

Hallie Siegel writes: According to the non-profit Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Applications Center, there are over 250 different configurations of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) in service today. That number is likely to grow in the coming years as the technology improves — note that the US Navy has made UUVs a priority and is planning to launch a whole squadron of them by 2020. Dan Gettinger from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College gives an overview of this technology.

38 comments

  1. Next up by behrooz0az · · Score: 0

    Drones in 4th dimention.

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    1. Re:Next up by alex67500 · · Score: 1

      You mean unmanned time machines??

    2. Re: Next up by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's dimension, not demention. Demention auto-corrects to detention, which is where your English teacher should have sent you.

      Brought to you by Carl's Jr. Because they pay me every time I say it.

    3. Re:Next up by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Next up

      Next kata , perhaps.

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    4. Re: Next up by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      It's dimension, not demention.

      He wrote dimention, not demention.

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      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  2. Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A solution to the Muslim invasion of Europe from Turkey

  3. Misread title by Gaygirlie · · Score: 1

    Misread title as "underwear drones" and already got excited that for once there's something new to read. Such a shame, underwear drones sounds like a much more fun topic than underwater drones.

    1. Re:Misread title by Chrisq · · Score: 1

      Misread title as "underwear drones" and already got excited that for once there's something new to read. Such a shame, underwear drones sounds like a much more fun topic than underwater drones.

      You are obviously not the first person to find this topic fun.

  4. Whiskers? by Coisiche · · Score: 1

    Are they making "whiskers" (Wireless Sea Knowledge Retrieval Satellites) for a large deep sea vehicle that they will call.. I dunno... SeaQuest?

  5. Re: More disgusting Republican corporate welfare by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They want to use these UAVs to spy on us.

  6. Re: More disgusting Republican corporate welfare by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fighting against expanding WIC is fighting to starve babies to death.

  7. Cool! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are they 3-D printed??

  8. Re: More disgusting Republican corporate welfare by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And you appear to understand the multiplicity of meaning.

  9. Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In a limited sense, the navy has been using autonomous underwater drones for ages now.

    That aside, though, submarines might well benefit even more than aircraft if you can get them working reasonably autonomously: adding enough room for a human and life support is hardly free in an aircraft; but at least the pressure difference between the cockpit and the outside is always going to be fairly modest. A submarine has no such luxury; with all but the ones purpose-built for deep sea research being restricted to fairly shallow dives by the fact that 'crush depth' is exactly what it sounds like.

    If you can get rid of the requirement for a pocket of air, you make surviving the pressures of deep water vastly easier and cheaper. Plus, removing the crew cuts down on limits to endurance: the electronics will require some power, and you still require power if you want to change depth or move; but you could drift with the current, waiting for an activation signal or a suitably interesting passive sonar signature for months on a mere trickle of power.

    On the minus side, can you imagine how much fun somebody with an interest in disrupting shipping could have with cheap, long-endurance, largely autonomous submarines? A lousy little fiberglass hull, since it's just to reduce drag, not to resist pressure; a big bladder of diesel, flooded batteries, an epoxy puck of electronics, and a little generator to top up the batteries when they get low. Dive depth would be limited primarily by the desire to keep water out of the generator, which would introduce a few gas pockets that could crush(if this really bothered you, you could flood the generator with a noncorrosive fluid for greatly increased crush resistance; at the cost of having to purge that before you can start running it); and set it loose to drift around the vicinity of the shipping lane of your choice until it hears a ship large enough to be worth blowing itself up against...

    Such a thing wouldn't be cheap by consumer standards; even small fishing/pleasure craft can run you 5 to mid 6 figures; and everything costs more underwater; but when a classy nuclear submarine can run you well north of 2 billion; and a 'cheap' diesel-electric ~500million; this sort of IED-of-the-sea would be virtually disposable by comparison.

    1. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by rmdingler · · Score: 1

      +1 shudder

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      Ernest Hemingway

    2. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      On the bright side, the tech would also be amenable to the production of improved narco-subs; so even if our container ships and oil tankers aren't making it through, we'll have something to take our minds off our problems!

    3. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by Zak3056 · · Score: 1

      If you can get rid of the requirement for a pocket of air, you make surviving the pressures of deep water vastly easier and cheaper.

      Not having a pocket of air sure makes changing depth a bitch, though.

      --
      What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
    4. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      You would need to be approximately neutrally buoyant, especially if low-energy loitering is the plan; but liquids lighter than water can also serve that purpose(and, since they are denser than air you'll need a larger volume of them; but since they are nearly in-compressible you just need an impermiable membrane rather than a pressure vessel).

      Off the cuff, I'd imagine that the easiest thing to do would be to use your fuel bladder for buoyancy, with ballast you discard as you consume the fuel. For the weight of the essential systems, at zero ballast, you could either get fancy and have a dedicated bladder of the lowest-density fluid that is acceptably cheap(this would be good if you wanted the thing to be recoverable, or to end-of-life as a floating contact mine); or you could just oversize the diesel bladder slightly and accept that the unit will sink after it burns through a sufficient amount of fuel(simpler, and good if you'd prefer that EOL units sink to the bottom rather than washing up where people might find them and try to trace them back to you).

      So long as you don't need to surface or dive terribly quickly, you can get away with very small changes in buoyancy as long as you are neutrally buoyant by default. The 'underwater glider' designs used for long-endurance marine sampling and such use that principle pretty effectively.

    5. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure, but that just causes mayhem in the shipping lane, rather like placing mines. More sinister is the drone you can talk to, and designate specific ships as targets, or specific days to go hunting. But underwater radio communication is impossible for the amateur, and hard even for the navy. Which makes me wonder if we are going to see encoded sound being used for the communication. This may be very bad for the whales and dolphins.

    6. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by bmk67 · · Score: 1

      If you can get rid of the requirement for a pocket of air [...]

      You cannot, not without sacrificing the ability to surface and change depth.

      Good luck with that.

    7. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Technically you can: N-PENTADECANE

      There's a DEFCON 21 talk on this topic. The punchline is: wax motors are high-force/high-latency/low-displacement change buoyancy engines that are extremely energy inefficient. The speaker ended up going the opposite direction(IE. shallow depth but low power) using medical syringes and pager motors to compress small gas pockets. This has a nice side benefit of avoiding enthalpy losses, or insulation concerns associated with using a heat engine. Other forms of air-independent propulsion do exist though... (Some are even low-cost. )

      The topic is interesting but the presentation was inadequately rehearsed and the speaker misspoke several times(10 degrees C is the thermocline / N-Pentadecane phase transition, and 60 degrees C is the approximate melting temperature of paraffin).

      If I could give it over again, I would have done more pool testing before the conference and brought some video footage of a glide test on stage with me. The yaw instability resulting from the lack of a stabilizer is noticeable if you watch closely. I never generated any drag data, but the surface finish would need to be vapor polished to achieve the desired laminar flow.

      Gushing about how much money I squandered on this project is the main thing I find embarrassing about it... I try not to think too much about the presentation quality and I hope it will still impress me as informative(despite its warts) once I'm finished with my education.

      Sincerely,
      @nickflipper

    8. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      Changing the volume of a pocket of air, swim bladder style, is certainly a good option for controlling buoyancy if you don't want to go too deep; but using low density liquids to reach neutral buoyancy, and then relying on control surfaces to 'fly' up or down is also an option.

      Fish have actually evolved in both directions; some have swim bladders and manipulate gas pockets for buoyancy control, some lack them; and have a largely constant density(depending on how much fatty tissue vs. bone and stuff they have) and control their depth by swimming.

      It really depends on what your objectives are: if you aren't planning on going terribly deep, a small pressure vessel for buoyancy control doesn't require really heroic structural support and only requires energy when you want to change your buoyancy.

      If you are planning on really deep dives, the challenges of keeping a gas bubble intact get pretty nasty(even the fancy high-precision alumina ceramic spheres that deep water ROVs use have 'sympathetic implosion' problems that have sent several craft to the bottom); so the possibility of substituting a low density liquid that doesn't need to be protected from compression is pretty attractive.

      Both options can be made to work, which one is more suitable depends on what you want to do with the craft.

    9. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

      I'd imagine that the low-budget/no-budget option would involve periodically surfacing to make radio contact and get a GPS fix, to correct for the limitations of dead reckoning and magnetic navigational instruments; and to receive amended orders. You'd have to balance the desire for fine-grained control versus the desire to make detection and attribution difficult, so you'd presumably want to provide the unit with as much of its mission before setting it loose as you can, with subsequent contact only as necessary.

    10. Re:Hey guys, 1979 wants its technology back! by lhowaf · · Score: 1

      Couldn't we just make even cheaper drones that go out and make sounds like a big target?

  10. With the success of JLENS, should we? by Zeorge · · Score: 1

    Or the F-35 or other "research projects" that the DoD seems to be spending money on that go nowhere? That "intelligent" fence along the border that costs millions but only covers 35 miles or something.

    Clearly, their are people who are looking to retire into a C-level position and are kicking these programs off.

  11. Aren't drones supposed to... by Flavianoep · · Score: 1

    Doesn't the word "drone" imply something that flies? Are those unmanned submarines drones even if they cannot fly?

    --
    Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
    1. Re:Aren't drones supposed to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nope, dictionary.com defines it thusly:

      any unmanned aircraft or ship that is guided remotely

  12. Re: More disgusting Republican corporate welfare by GLMDesigns · · Score: 1

    .How about we stop subsidizing people from having babies they can't afford.

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  13. Darwin says by future+assassin · · Score: 1

    he for one welcomes his new under water drone overlords. Daaarwin smaaart dolphin. Darwin go play fetch laser now.

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    by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*