Small UUVs Make a Splash

Small unmanned underwater vehicles have been outshined by their aerial counterparts for years, as flying drones have become popular tools and toys across the United States and abroad.

But makers of compact UUVs report they are starting to enjoy a miniboom of their own.

Small UUVs Make a Splash The Underwater Domain is Catching a Wave of New Platforms

By Marc Selinger

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Small UUVs are increasingly being used for military, commercial and recreational purposes ranging from mine warfare to infrastructure inspection to exploration. To meet the growing demand, new companies are forming and existing companies are rolling out new products.

“We’re clearly seeing more players involved,” says Rich Leonard, chief executive officer of Bluefin Robotics, a Battelle subsidiary that has been building underwater drones for almost two decades.

UUVs are benefitting from some of the same factors that boosted unmanned aerial vehicles, including the rise of cheap components and more capable software. But the UUV sector

Aquabotix, which makes the HydroView Pro, shown here, plans to roll out new products in 2016.

remains a few years behind UAS, partly due to unique technological challenges.

“The hardest part about everything to do with the ocean is keeping the electronics away from the water,” says Durval Tavares, president and CEO of Aquabotix. “As you go deep, if you go down to say 1,000 feet, you’re talking somewhere around 450 pounds, 480 pounds of pressure on the vessel itself, so it goes through a lot more trauma in the water than you would see in the air. So everything about the technology underwater is about keeping the vessel intact and the electronics dry.” uuu

Bluefin, of Quincy, Massachusetts, is developing SandShark, a five-inchdiameter autonomous underwater vehicle that ranges in length from 23 inches to 60 inches, depending on the payload.

Bluefin has delivered 10 SandShark demonstration units to DARPA through the Adaptable Sensor System program. Research entities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rhode Island and several Navy agencies, will use them for experimentation.

Photos: Aquabotix, Bluefin Robotics.

“Getting AUVs to these clients that they can experiment with is going to be key,” Leonard says. “Clients are looking at all the amazing things that are being done with the aerial robots and thinking, ‘Wow, could I do that undersea?’”

During a technology expo in mid-2016 at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, five or six SandSharks will be released from a revolver-like payload delivery system installed in the center

Bluefin Robotics says its five-inch-diameter SandShark can serve as a testbed for subsea sensors.

of a larger 21-inch-diameter Bluefin AUV. The SandSharks will demonstrate the use of various sensors, such as cameras and sonar imaging and the ability to coordinate their location with each other.

Bluefin is looking at upgrades and new uses for its Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, also known as MK19, which the Navy uses to inspect ship hulls for enemy mines. Under the Hull UUV Neutralization System program, it is using ONR funds to put robotic arms

on the vehicle so the HUAV could replace human divers in destroying the mines.

Currently, a diver “takes a small explosive charge and places it on the mine that’s been put on the ship,” Leonard says. “So, obviously, getting the diver out of the water and not doing that has a lot of advantages.”

Bluefin is also exploring using the HUAV to inspect inside aboveground storage tanks.

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“

I read somewhere that there’s going to be 500,000 aerial drones given away as gifts for the holidays.

[The UUV market is] not nearly that big yet, but hopefully it will be. ­­—David Lang, OpenROV cofounder

tether, can perform close inspections in ROV mode.”

As of press time, Aquabotix was planning in January to announce a new line of ROVs called Endura, which will provide more battery life, payload capacity and depth than its existing ROVs. Aquabotix customers include U.S. and foreign militaries; boat and port security agencies; and inspectors of dams, drinking water, fish farms, piers and ships.

Environmental firms are showing growing interest in using the company’s products to detect and respond to emergencies, such as oil spills.

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OpenROV, which has sold UUV kits for years, is developing its first fully assembled vehicle, Trident, and plans to start delivering it to customers in November 2016. The company touts Trident as “an underwater drone for everyone” and the “future of ocean exploration.”

A Fathom Drone pre-prototype undergoes propulsion testing.

they actually have to drain the tank,” Leonard says. “We’re working with several oil and gas primes” on lowering an inspection robot into a tank “so you don’t have to drain the tank.”

Meanwhile, Aquabotix, whose flagship products include the HydroView Pro and HydroView Sport remotely operated vehicles, is rolling out new UUVs. The Fall River, Massachusettsbased company announced in 28 |

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October that its new 36-pound, 43-inch-long, single-person-deployable Hybrid Autonomous/Remote Vehicle, a combination AUV/ROV, would go into production, with deliveries starting in January. The vehicle’s price starts at about $50,000.

“Customers will no longer need two vehicles to perform one complete evaluation of the underwater landscape,” Tavares says. “The Hybrid ARV performs broad searches in the AUV mode and, after adding the

OpenROV, of Berkeley, California, has already sold the first 1,000 Tridents through a Kickstarter campaign and expects strong demand for the $1,199 UUV from scientists, scuba divers, boat and pipeline inspectors, aquaculture facilities, search-andrescue teams, and explorers.

“I read somewhere that there’s going to be 500,000 aerial drones given away as gifts for the holidays,” OpenROV cofounder David Lang said a few days before Christmas. The UUV market is “not nearly that big yet, but hopefully it will be.”

Trident can exceed four knots per hour, compared to two knots for the kits, and is more agile than the kit-based UUVs. It weighs under

seven pounds and is about the size of a thick laptop.

“It’s very portable in a way that ROVs have not been,” Lang says. “I fit two of them in carry-on luggage, which is just unheard of. That kind of portability opens up a lot more possibilities, because it’s something you can easily store on a small boat.

It’s something that you can go hiking with if you want to get to an alpine lake. It’s something that you can fly with easily. All these places that underwater robots and drones have traditionally not been able to go, Trident is going to be able to go there.”

Driven by a smartphone or tablet, Trident will initially be tracked with a tether. But OpenROV and others are developing underwater acoustic positioning systems to allow Trident to sail untethered.

“I think that’s going to be coming along soon,” Lang says.

Photo: Fathom Drone, Ed Whitman / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Fathom Drone, a startup founded by four students at Hope College in western Michigan, is developing a backpack-portable, video cameraequipped UUV to allow hikers, scuba divers and others to explore underwater, from backyard lakes to coral reefs.

“Right now, we’re saying 150 feet is where we can go down to,” says Matt Gira, one of the cofounders.

“You can cover anything that you can scuba dive essentially.”

The company is finishing a prototype and plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in early 2016 to raise money for production and generate initial sales. The footballsized, smartphone-controlled UUV will retail for $600, making it affordable for a large number of customers.

“We think [we could sell] in the thousands,” Gira says. “Millions would be great, but our realistic goal is in the thousands.” 

Flying Swimmers UAVs and UUVs Converge Several research agencies are working on unmanned systems that combine two activities — flying and swimming — into a single system.

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory is developing two small unmanned reconnaissance systems that operate in both water and air. One is a quadcopter, the Corrosion Resistant Aerial Covert Unmanned Nautical System (CRACUNS); the other is the triangle-shaped Flying Fish.

CRACUNS is designed to be launched by an underwater vehicle or diver and fly like an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle. In a September 2014 test, CRACUNS popped out of a water-filled quarry and became airborne. Tom Murdock, supervisor of APL’s ocean systems and engineering group, says the waterproof, 12-pound CRACUNS can be built for $3,000 to $4,000 each, a fraction of a comparable canister-launched UAS. APL, a U.S. government-sponsored research center based in Laurel, Maryland, envisions that the military could eventually deploy CRACUNS in swarms to overwhelm an enemy.

“The cost to defeat [a CRACUNS swarm] is way more than the cost to deploy it,” says Jason Stipes, supervisor of APL’s unmanned vehicle section. “It opens up a lot of new possibilities.”

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus highlighted CRACUNS during a speech at AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems Defense conference in October in Arlington, Virginia, saying such devices could be expendable, “allowing them to penetrate into particularly hostile environments with no plan of return.”

For now, CRACUNS is considered a technology demonstration project.

CRACUNS is released from underwater and flies like a UAS.

Jason Stipes (left) and Tom Murdock of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory display CRACUNS, which is released from underwater and flies like a UAS.

Joe Moore of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory inspects the Flying Fish UUV/UAS.

“The big challenge here is getting the sponsors to hit the ‘I believe’ button on the fact that we are completely changing the way the paradigm is,” Murdock says.

During testing in 2015, Flying Fish, which is about 20 inches long and has a nose-mounted propeller, briefly flew out of a backyard swimming pool after being submerged in the water. Flying Fish’s time in the air was intentionally cut short to avoid a collision with the nearby house, says Joe Moore, an APL robotics researcher. APL is looking at testing the vehicle in its own pond so it can conduct longer flights. APL also plans to develop a larger version to carry more payload.

Moore estimated that Flying Fish could be ready for warfighter use in about five years. “Say there’s a chemical spill and you couldn’t get close enough to sense how bad it was in this particular body of water,” he said. With Flying Fish, a soldier could “just throw it up in the air, it takes off, it dives down into the pond, it collects a sample or takes some information and comes back.”

APL is not the only entity working in this dual-domain area. Rutgers School of Engineering in Piscataway, New Jersey, is using a $618,000 grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to continue developing Naviator, a combined unmanned underwater vehicle/UAS octocopter. A video posted online by the university shows the remotely controlled Naviator moving back and forth between a swimming pool and the air above.

Potential uses include looking for underwater mines, tracking enemy ships, aiding search-and-rescue operations, inspecting bridges, and mapping oil spills and passageways.

“Mines are probably the biggest problem for the Navy,” says F. Javier Diez, the associate professor of engineering who oversees the project as director of the Rutgers Applied Fluids Lab. “They need to map where mines are. Now there are a lot of false positives. This could be a better technology to rapidly investigate these potential threats.”

To provide that kind of capability, Naviator will need to receive several upgrades, including the ability to carry payloads and be controlled with sound pulses instead of a tether, Rutgers says. By the summer

Photos: Ed Whitman / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

of 2016, university engineers plan to test Naviator with sensors and without a tether and demonstrate that it can swim in a “seawater environment.”

ONR’s Naval Research Laboratory is developing Flimmer, a “flying swimmer” that operates as both a UUV and UAS. Flimmer, which is small and light enough for one person to hold in his arms, is designed to be launched as a UAS. It then splashes into the water and swims underwater, like a bird diving for fish to eat. Flimmer’s sensors could measure environmental parameters, look for chemicals in the water or search for the source of oil leaks.

“The Navy is looking for unique solutions for emplacing sensors, for getting data in hard-to-reach locations, and Flimmer is just one idea out of many that holds promise,” says Dan Edwards, Flimmer’s principal investigator. “We’re working through issues like any research that’s very far out of the box.”

In an NRL video, Edwards explains the design decisions that must be made, like “Where do we put fins for underwater propulsion in order not to mess up the aerodynamics?” and “Where do we put the wings so we don’t mess up the hydrodynamics?”

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is developing Flimmer, a combined UUV-UAV.

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