Inside Defense Coverage Highlights Navy’s Google-Inspired UUV Confidence Course
Inside Defense reported this week that the U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Underwater Vehicle Confidence Course in Keyport, Washington, was inspired by a “city” Google built to test drive its own autonomous vehicle.
Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, commander, Naval Submarine Forces, made the comments during a March 25 panel discussion hosted by the Hudson Institute.
“The Future of Autonomous Undersea Warfare” panel also included Duane Fotheringham, president of the Uncrewed Systems group at HII Mission Technologies, and Matt Britton, director of ISR hardware in Mission Technologies’ Warfare Systems group.
“We’ve taken a lesson from some of the self-driving cars,” Gaucher said. “In particular, when they built the Google car, they built a city in California to just practice driving the streets for autonomy purposes. So, we’ve built our underwater version of that up in the Keyport area.”
Gaucher added: “We’re taking, you know, I’ll call a SpaceX approach to, ‘Hey, get it out there and operate.’”
HII’s REMUS 620 medium-class UUV was the first MUUV to complete the course, validating several technical aspects of the vehicle.
The Inside Defense story noted that HII’s UUVs are all designed with open architecture.
“We’re there on modularity,” Fotheringham said. “I mean, we can always improve that. But right now, you know, as we build the vehicles and we design the vehicles we can take out energy sections, and we can replace them. It’s really energy agnostic.”
Listen to the panel discussion at hudson.org.
Read the full story at insidedefense.com (subscription required).
Read more about the REMUS 620’s performance on the UUV Confidence Course at hii.com.
