Naomi Cooper
The U.S. Marine Corps demonstrated two uncrewed low-profile vessel prototypes, designed by Leidos, during Project Convergence Capstone 4, a joint and multinational military exercise hosted by the U.S. Army.
Leidos said Friday the LPV prototypes were delivered to the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in 2023 for testing and technical assessment and their participation in the exercise marks the next stage of experimentation for the autonomous-capable vessels.
“The prototypes we’ve delivered will help create new disruptive logistics capabilities for the Marine Corps. Its low profile and long range are intended to help the vessels achieve a higher mission success rate supporting dispersed Marine fire units than conventional methods,” said Dave Lewis, senior vice president of the sea systems business area at Leidos.
The LPVs feature a low-to-the-water visual profile to evade detection, have a payload capacity of up to five tons over a range of 2,000 nautical miles and can experiment with various autonomous control systems.
Leidos designed the uncrewed vessels through a contract with Montana State University’s MilTech research lab, an authorized national government partnership intermediary.
More than 4,000 service members and civilians from the militaries of the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France and Japan participated in PC-C4 to experiment, test and validate the interoperability between mission partner forces.
