The Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and the Navy’s Program Office Advanced Undersea Systems (PMS 394) have selected three vendors to prototype and develop Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) platforms.
The DIU says that undersea warfare is critical to success in the Pacific and other contested environments, providing needed autonomous underwater sensing and payload delivery in dispersed, long-range, deep and contested environments is key. In particular, the U.S. military...
Artist’s conception of the Boeing Orca XLUUV. Boeing Image
LONDON — Britain’s Ministry of Defence is exploring options for the development of an Extra Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (XLUUV) to conduct covert missions at distances of up to ranges 3,000 nautical miles for three months at a time for the Royal Navy.
As a preliminary step, the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), similar to the Pentagon’s DARPA, launched a competition this week to find an autonomous control...
https://news.usni.org/2019/04/17/u-k-developing-its-own-xluuv-for-royal-navy
Boeing Echo Voyager. Boeing Co. photo.
The Navy awarded Boeing a $43-million contract to build four Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs) that will become multi-mission for the service, according to a Wednesday Pentagon contract announcement.
Boeing based its winning Orca XLUUV design on its Echo Voyager unmanned diesel-electric submersible. The 51-foot-long submersible is launched from a pier and can operate autonomously while sailing up to 6,500 nautical miles without being...