NEW NAVY “MASTER PLAN” FOR DRONES

The U.S. Navy is junk­ing its old blue­prints for under­sea robots, and is putting together a new “mas­ter plan” for its unmanned vehi­cles, National Defense mag­a­zine reports.
“Ambitious plans to spread UUVs (unmanned under­wa­ter vehi­cles) across the fleet have been toned down by the com­plex­ity of the tech­nol­ogy and soar­ing costs,” the mag­a­zine says.
The long-​​range mine recon­nais­sance sys­tem, or LMRS, appears to be the first casu­alty. In devel­op­ment since 1999, the torpedo-​​size LMRS is search for mines. But now, the Navy thinks that the drones are too lim­ited — tack­ling only the mine-​​hunting job — for the price — $20 to $30 mil­lion for a two-​​vehicle sys­tem, with bat­tery packs that cost $250,000 a pop.
So instead, the Navy is look­ing at tiny drones (maybe as lit­tle as 21 inches long) that can han­dle a vari­ety of under­wa­ter duties, from sur­veil­lance to nav­i­ga­tion to com­mu­ni­ca­tions relay.
The Navy’s revised drone strat­egy should be fin­ished in about a year, National Defense says.

April 22nd, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.