Analysis of Design Directions for Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs)

Abstract

In recent years, because of the development of marine military science technology, there is a growing interest in the unmanned systems throughout the world. Also, the demand of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) which can be autonomously operated without the operator intervention is increasing dramatically. The growing interests lie in the facts that those USVs can be manufactured at much lower costs, and can be operated without the human fatigue, while can be sent to the hostile or quite dangerous areas that are inherently unhealthy for human operators. The utilization and the deployment of such vessels will continue to grow in the future. In this paper, along with the technological development of unmanned surface vehicles, we investigate and analyze the cases of already developed platforms and identify the trends of the technological advances. Additionally, we suggest the future directions of development.

Survey on the Developments of Unmanned Marine Vehicles: Intelligence and Cooperation

“…Effective deployment and maintenance of ASW capabilities against increasing submarine threats are critical [ 53 ]. ASWs operate using the relative positions of sensors and snipers, and a variety of variations—single-state (transmitters and receivers deployed on a single USV), dual-state, and multistate approaches (transmitters and receivers deployed on various platforms/USVs).…”

“…Israel developed ‘Protector’ in 2003 [ 46 ], which is smaller than the US-developed Roboski. ‘Protector’ of the Israel Rafael weapon, ‘Stingray’ of the Israel Elbit systems Ltd., and ‘Katana’ of the Israel aerospace industries (IAI) are typical USV technologies developed by their domestic companies [ 53 ]. Rafael, an Israeli state-run defense company, recently completed a sea launch test of a spike ER missile using a Protector in 2017 [ 57 ].…”

“…However, the development of a fully autonomous USV continues because human intervention is unavoidable when USVs are in emergencies [ 122 , 123 ]. The US Navy has developed the Anaconda 2.0 USV, which can be operated remotely in an unobstructed area; however, an autonomous USV equipped with full artificial intelligence (AI) is still under development [ 53 ].…”

Development of informationally-protected system of marine water area monitoring

“…Analysis of the structures of unmanned over-water apparatus, designed for monitoring of the marine environment was made in [10]. However, the proposed structures do not contain a component, designed for information protection.…”