Unmanned ‘Swarmboats’ act as guard dogs for warships and harbors

WASHINGTON (LOG NEWS SERVICE) — In a demonstration conducted recently in the lower Chesapeake Bay the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research demonstrated the ability of unmanned patrol boats to protect friendly harbors. During the demonstration the small and unmanned boats patrolled the harbor, detected intruders and chased them from the area they were protecting with only remote human supervision rather than direct human operation as they performed their missions. “This demonstration showed some remarkable advances in autonomous capabilities,” Cmdr. Luis Molina, military deputy for ONR’s Sea Warfare and Weapons Department, said. “While previous work had focused on autonomous protection of high-value ships, this time we were focused on harbor approach defense.” The autonomy technology being developed by ONR is called Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, or CARACaS. The components that make up CARACaS (some are commercial off-the-shelf) are inexpensive compared to the costs of maintaining manned vessels for some of the dull, dirty or dangerous tasks—all of which can be found in the work of harbor approach defense, experts say. “The U.S. Navy knows our most important asset, without question, is our highly trained military personnel,” Dr. Robert Brizzolara, the program officer at ONR who oversees the effort, said. “The...