Challenges and opportunities abound for US in autonomy research
Artist’s impression of a Manta Ray UUV under construction by Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation and Martin Defense Group. (Photo: DARPA)
DARPA continues to explore the potential of uncrewed platforms across the air, land and sea domains — although industry, academia and government agree that challenges must still be overcome.
During Sea Air Space 2022, the conference session on “Unmanned Advancements in Warfighting” provided an opportunity for speakers to give an overview of US unmanned programmes and discuss the challenges remaining to be addressed.
DARPA already has a number of unmanned programmes in place to explore the possibilities that manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) will offer to the warfighters of tomorrow in all domains.
For underwater missions, DARPA developed its Hunter XL UUV as well as underwater gliders. The latter are built with a time link to function as communication relays while they are out at sea for long periods of time.
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