Leidos is creating a number of new unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) with cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), sensing capabilities, and other features. With these ships and the USVs Seahawk and Sea Hunter, which were made by Leidos, more and more jobs can be done without putting human divers in danger.
They will have equipment that supports both commercial and military operations.
U.S. adversaries spend billions of dollars annually in the underwater domain, including on unmanned platforms, posing a threat to American forces and underwater infrastructure.
Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, a senior executive at Leidos and a retired admiral, claims that we are in the midst of a momentous change in warfare. “The move toward autonomy, especially in naval AI, could have as big of an effect on the future of war as did the development of aviation a hundred years ago.”
According to Chuck Fralick, a retired Navy officer and CTO of Leidos Maritime, Viperfish will be one of the most technologically sophisticated and densely packed underwater vehicles ever built.
Viperfish is based on the L3Harris Iver4 900 unmanned underwater vehicles. It will help the U.S. Navy with tasks like detecting mines, collecting data, and figuring out what is going on in the ocean.
According to Fralick, the integration of trustworthy AI, potent lithium batteries, synthetic aperture sonar sensors (SAS), and increased onboard processing power will enable us to fully realize the potential of unmanned underwater vehicles. “We think Viperfish will be an elegant fusion of all those pieces at precisely the right time for the U.S. Navy,” the statement continued.
Impact on business: Leidos and Nauticus Robotics are making a larger unmanned underwater vehicles for underwater exploration tasks that may be too dangerous or impossible for human divers, such as:
- Charting the ocean’s bottom
- Examining marine life
- Keeping track of water pollution
Carr says that both of the ships are important projects for Leidos, which was one of the first companies to make autonomous oceangoing systems.
Looking forward Both experts agree that unmanned underwater vehicles will be able to do missions that are longer and harder, adapt quickly to changing conditions, and have less subsystem failures in the future.
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