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The Future of Undersea Warfare
A carrier task group is trapped by a mine field laid by the enemy and exposed to air and surface attacks. Several P-8s ASW patrol aircraft fly over the mine field and, in a predetermined pattern, launch a swarm of micro-UUVs from their sonobuoy tubes to find a clear channel for the carrier task group to safely break out into the open sea. Each UUV of the swarm sweeps a sector of the mine field with high-resolution sonar and executes onboard CAD/CAC processing for the detection and positioning of mine-like objects on the bottom and in the water column. Upon completing its assigned sector, each UUV surfaces and transmits mine-like object position data to MCM central control, where the data are analyzed and a safe passage course transmitted to the carrier task group for breakout.
Sound like science fiction? Not so, as recent step changes in cost, endurance, size and power have made swarming UUV applications fundamentally more practical, effective and attractive as real-world solutions, rather than just academic exercises.
As the availability of small UUVs, increasing energy density, miniature payloads, better sensors, faster processors and improved communications becomes widespread, the potential for pervasive undersea mission capabilities based on the coordinated operation of multiple, small UUVs becomes both feasible and desirable. Furthermore, as future undersea mission concepts rely more heavily on offboard sensing, communications relays, lon- ger geographical distances and larger areas, it becomes imperative to consider coordinated, autonomous multivehicle operations in order to meet mission costs, distance/ area coverage, task concurrency, mission effectiveness and execution time constraints.
Swarm Missions
Coordinated, multivehicle mission architectures and concepts are generally referred to as swarm mission applications. Typical benefits of swarm missions include a dramatic scaling up of mission performance by concurrent operations over larger areas of operation, reduction in mission execution times, or combination thereof. Depending on the swarm mission, anticipated mission performance improvements will generally scale linearly with the number of UUVs, sensors or payloads employed. Furthermore, multivehicle swarm architectures also provide unique benefits to certain missions, such as the ability to use multiple sensors in multi-static sensing for widebaseline sensor correlation, or coordinated operation of heterogeneous platforms (different payloads, sensors or platform capabilities) for real-time, cued-handoff, single-sortie mission engagements....