By Franz-Stefan Gady
An autonomous vessel designed to track Chinese and Russian subs in shallow waters gets new sonar.
The prototype of a U.S. Navy robot ship was recently equipped with a new hull-mounted sonar system, IHS Defense Weekly reports.
The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), received Raytheon’s Modular Scalable Sonar System (MS 3), which “will be integrated as the ACTUV’s primary search-and-detection sonar,” according to the article. The sonar system will produce an “acoustic image” of targets in order to identify and classify vessels in close proximity to the robot ship.
“Designed to autonomously conduct active and passive searches, detect torpedoes, filter passive threats, localize and track submarines, and avoid small objects, the MS 3 is Raytheon’s first fifth-generation medium-frequency hull-mounted sonar system,” IHS Defense Weekly explains.
The ACTUV is an unmanned autonomous trimaran designed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for the military’s use. DARPA was tasked with developing an anti-submarine drone — a robot ship capable of tracking enemy subs in shallow waters in 2010.
Read the full story at The Diplomat