WASHINGTON — For the Navy, the potential of unmanned vehicles is recognized, but yet to be fully realized. Scott Littlefield, program manager for the ACTUV program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, spoke to Defense News Executive Editor Jill Aitoro about one vessel designed to complete missions at sea without ever having a human on board.
What is the ACTUV program?
It's a large unmanned surface vehicle initially designed to do a submarine track and trail mission. But as the program has evolved, we're looking at a lot of other applications for it. The Navy has been doing work in unmanned sea vehicles of various kinds for a long time – at least a couple decades. The breaking point that came with the DARPA program was to look at a much larger and more capable vessel with a higher level of autonomy. What we're designing is not something that would be launched and recovered from another ship. Instead we're looking at something that can actually leave the pier and get anywhere in the world from US. territory. It's got a lot of range and endurance, can stay out on sea missions for weeks to months, and because of its size can do things that couldn't be done by a smaller vessel.
The other piece was to allow it to do that safely without being in constant communication with a human operator. We didn't want to simply build a remote-controlled boat; we wanted something that would make decisions about avoiding collisions with other ships, for example. Can it obey the rules of the road at sea?
Give me an example of how this might be used in a mission.
I mentioned anti-submarine warfare; what we started with was that this could be used to provide a persistent ability to do track and trail on someone else's diesel-electric submarine. There are a lots of subs in the world. The track and trail mission is a resource intensive mission because we have to use expensive warships. The idea was if we could build a much less expensive but still capable unmanned system to do that mission, it would offload that from the manned vessels and be an affordable way to create capacity. The Navy [also] has a lot of interest is mine countermeasures. Clearly we don't want to send manned vessels into mine fields, so using an unmanned surface vehicle to do that sort of mission makes a lot of sense.
Where does the program stand?
Leidos is our prime contractor. We awarded a contract to them in August 2012. Since then they did all the design and construction of the full-scale prototype. We launched it at the shipyard in January 2016. We've been doing lots of testing. We have a strong working relationship with the Office of Naval Research. As the DARPA program is winding down, we're handing this off to ONR, and they'll continue to test the vehicle for the next year and a half.
Ultimately the Navy decides whether this becomes a program of record?
I think we're well-positioned. The surface Navy is already thinking about their future fleet architecture, and how something like a large unmanned surface vehicle could fit into that mix of manned warships. So it's not a done deal, but we feel optimistic.
Jill Aitoro is editor of Defense News. She is also executive editor of Sightline Media's Business-to-Government group, including Defense News, C4ISRNET, Federal Times and Fifth Domain. She brings over 15 years’ experience in editing and reporting on defense and federal programs, policy, procurement, and technology.
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