Nichols Martin
A U.S. Navy warfare center has teamed up with Huntington Ingalls Industries to integrate a threat detection system onto an unmanned surface vehicle as part of a cooperative research and development agreement.
The partnership seeks to equip a commercially developed USV platform with technology that the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division created to autonomously recognize and classify various threats, Naval Sea Systems Command said Friday.
A team of scientific and engineering professionals under the coastal and maritime security branch of NSWC PCD incorporated radar, sensing, machine learning and video analytics tools into the Threat Tracker.
Jeremy Johnson, the center’s project manager for Threat Tracker, said the agreement with HII offers the service branch an opportunity to demonstrate the system’s potential application to the future naval fleet.
“One of the reasons HII has invested in USV autonomous and artificial intelligence technology is to support the Navy’s distributed maritime operations,” said Brian McKeon, senior director of technology at HII’s unmanned systems business group.
Federal laboratories use CRADA to license and transfer technologies to companies, academic institutions or state and local agencies they believe could support the warfighter mission.
