Defence Procurement International: AUV : Taking the man out of the minefield

Published on Defence Procurement International, Winter 2016/2017

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By Anita Hawseraway

" Traditional minehunter vessels are made from glass-reinforced plastic so they don’t trigger sea mines that are activated by a ship’s magneticsignature, but they are costly to acquire and maintain and slow moving.

“Navies don’t want to buy minehunting vessles anymore,” remarks Dominique Mallet, mine warfare business manager at French company, ECA Group, which manufactures a range of robotic mine countermeasures (MCM) solutions. “They [minehunters] are not designed to go far, whereas unmanned systems offer additional operational capabilities and can go far away for a long time.”

A SYSTEM OF ROBOTS

Navies first dipped their toes in ‘robotics’ using remotely-operated vehicles to hunt for and dispose of sea mines. But various Navies are now looking to make the transition from traditional minehunter vessels to the next generation of MCM based on a system or robots or unmanned systems for detecting, identifying, classifying and neutralising mines.The year 2016 saw a number of significant technological milestones in the area of unmanned MCM. In an indication perhaps of the maturity of the technology in this domain, French-based ECA Group delivered several fully robotised underwater mine countermeasure systems to navies. ECA says the mines can now be detected using high resolution sonar fitted to unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), minimising the need for the mothership or minehunter vessels to enter the danger zone. Once the sonar has detected potential mines, inspection robots are used to identify and confirm, via video images, that the object is indeed a mine. A remotely-operated disposal vehicle is used to destroy the mine. The robots can be launched either from a mother ship or remotely deployed from an autonomous surface vessel (ASV). Keeping the traditional vessel in a stand-off position relaxes the design constraints of the ship, says ECA, making the robotic platform less expensive than conventional minehunters, while offering a faster means of reaching the operation zone and more flexible mission configurations to perform other tasks such as maritime surveillance. “The trend is to do offboard MCM,” says Mallet of ECA Group, which has developed a family of unmanned vehicles for a wide range of MCM missions, including mine disposal in shallow waters using its Inspector Mk2ASV fitted with a front and rear sonar.

Mallet says the ASV can have real-time data transfer to a ship 10 km to 12 km away so the ship can stay far away from danger. ECA’s system of robots could also be used for civilian applications such as harbour security, dispensing with the need for a dedicated ship for mine detection.

NAVAL DEMONSTRATIONS

ECA demonstrated its technology for the Belgium Navy’s Unmanned MCM Trials in the North Sea in mid-

September. The trial evaluated the operation of unmanned MCM systems against legacy equipment currently used by the Belgian Navy. The Belgian Navy’s legacy MCM system is comprised of six Flower-class Tripartite coastal minehunters with hull-mounted sonars and a Remotely Operated Vehicles  (ROV) in the minefield.

For the trial in the North Sea, ECA fielded its autonomous underwater vessel (AUV), the A9-M, a 70 kg underwater vehicle with an endurance of 10 hours. The A9-M, which is already in use with the French Navy, can be deployed and operated from rigid hull inflatable boats by two operators or from coastal patrol vessels. For the Belgian demonstration, the A9-M was deployed from a RHIB, which was offloaded from a coastal patrol vessel.

ECA Group says the A9-M dived for five hours, covering an area of a square kilometre, with 200% coverage of the surveyed area, enabling detection and classification of more than 100 potential Mine Like Objects on the seabed. Further trials of unmanned MCM systems are planned by the Belgian Navy in spring 2017. The UK’s Royal Navy is also trialling unmanned MCM systems. During Unmanned Warrior 2016, one of the largest demonstrations of unmanned maritime and air systems ever staged for the Royal Navy off the west coast of Scotland in October, minehunter ships tested robotic submersibles with advanced sonar for seeking out dummy mines."

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