Fasten your seat-belts, folks; the Navy is going autonomous. Well, partially.
Last week, they released a demo video of the highly anticipated autonomous swarm technology. These autoboat centurions are designed to seek, flank and destroy ships at sea with protective, technologically-advanced vigor. The first-of-its-kind technology allows unmanned Navy vessels to overwhelm an adversary.
An unmanned 11-meter rigid hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) from Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored demonstration of swarmboat technology held on the James River in Newport News, Va. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released)
It is technology that, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) says, will allow any unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to not only protect Navy ships, but also, for the first time, autonomously “swarm” offensively on hostile vessels. I feel like I’ve seen this movie. Didn’t Ender use swarm technology to destroy that planet?
But before we get into all that, let’s take a look at what this swarm is, and what it can do.
[photo] The technology – called CARACaS (Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing) – (currently under development by ONR) can be put into a transportable kit and installed on almost any boat. It is small, about the size of a Rubik’s cube, but packs quite a punch, according to Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder.
“With this small pack of brains I can now turn a patrol craft into a fully capable, unmanned weapons system,” he explains. Now, the Navy has experimented with this technology before. The difference is that those tests were with one or two ships, and everyone knows that you need more than a couple to make up a swarm.
“That’s why this is so much bigger, because what I’m offering is now we’ve adapted this technology to take on multiple vessels.”
In the demonstrations, as many as 13 Navy boats operated using either autonomous or remote control. First they escorted a high-value Navy ship, and then, when a simulated enemy vessel was detected, the boats sped into action, swarming around the threat.
Here’s the video of that demonstration in swarming action:
The original, very basic foundational work on CARACaS actually started with the Mars Rover, according to Klunder. What the Navy has done is adapted that kind of autonomous tech to do multi-vessel swarming capability.
Four unmanned remotely operated high-speed maneuvering surface targets (HSMSTs) move to their blocking positions during an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored demonstration of autonomous swarmboat technology held on the James River in Newport News, Va. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class John Paul Kotara/Released)
However, where the Mars rover works by itself, the CARACaS allows multiple boats to operate autonomously. That is, without someone physically needing to be at the controls in the boat.
This includes operating in sync with other unmanned vessels; choosing their own routes; swarming to interdict enemy vessels; and escorting/protecting naval assets. They can swarm and protect a high value unit. They can engage a threat. They can encircle that threat, they can overwhelm and even destroy the threat if necessary.
That said, I they’re far from being the masters of their own destiny. It’s more of a hive mind, with a human at the helm of the brain.
“The purpose of this demonstration was to allow the swarming technology to enable itself,” Rear Adm. Klunder points out. “We were not planning to destroy the target. We certainly could have done that if that was needed, but in this case we just wanted to prove the swarming technology.”
The new technology will also allow the USVs to detect, deter or destroy attacking adversaries, but fear not, SciFi fans. This isn’t the type of system that’s likely to go “rogue” and start learning to loathe humanity or whatever. Any weapons fire from the USVs would need to be initiated by a real live human being supervising the mission. They Navy also installed a series of redundant safety protocols.
“If the CARACaS lost communications with the human overseer, or the human operator, the boat would go dead in the water,” explains ONR Program Manager Dr. Robert Brizzolara, chief scientist for the autonomous swarm technology. “We also had two separate communications links besides the CARACaS link to each boat, so that if a CARACaS boat started doing something it wasn’t supposed to do, either of those two separate communications links could be used to kill the boat. Just stop it dead in the water. So we had that triple redundancy safety system for the purposes of this demonstration.”
Human direction and built-in safety protocols are, of course, by design. Naval leadership has emphasized a blended force of manned and unmanned systems in recent years. In fact, the Navy is emphatic – almost to the point of ensuring – that there are humans in the loop when it comes to decision-making.
An unmanned seven meter rigid hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) operates autonomously during an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-sponsored demonstration of swarmboat technology held on the James River in Newport News, Va. (U.S. Navy photo by John F. Williams/Released)
“If there’s any kind of designation, any kind targeting, any kind of destructive acts that we know will occur, we still believe that there should be a human that makes that decision. There’s always a human in the loop of that designation of the target, and if so, the destruction of the target,” Rear Adm. Klunder says, except now, instead of forty sailors on board a series of ships, “we now basically have one sailor overseeing the event, which allows, as you can imagine, all those other sailors to be doing critical tasks back on our ships.”
This means that the work comes at a very low cost. The Navy is adapting what they already have and not going out and spending millions to buy new patrol craft. So not only can USVs take on dangerous missions, thus protecting the warfighter, but multiple USVs are but a fraction of the cost of a single large manned ship.
So when will the rest of the fleet receive their own set of autonomous swarm Borg cubes? Rear Adm. Klunder mentions there are plans to make this technology operational and in the fleet within a year.
“We will try to exercise all the capabilities that CARACaS provides us,” he said.
Interestingly, the swarm demo announcement comes near the somber anniversary of the terrorist attack on USS Cole (DDG-67) off the coast of Yemen. In that October 2000 attack, a small boat laden with explosives was able to get near a guided-missile destroyer and detonate, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39 others. Autonomous swarmboat capabilities could play a vital role in protecting people, ports and commerce.
“While the attack on Cole was not the only motivation for developing autonomous swarm capability, it certainly is front and center in our minds, and hearts,” said Klunder. “If Cole had been supported by autonomous USVs, they could have stopped that attack long before it got close to our brave men and women on board.”
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Jessica L. Tozer is the editor and blogger for Armed with Science. She is an Army veteran and an avid science fiction fan, both of which contribute to her enthusiasm for science and technology in the military.
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