Engineering news
Royal Navy is to demonstrate unmanned systems at its Unmanned Warrior event, which will feature 40 participants from the Ministry of Defence, industry and academia, to assess the technology in a realistic military setting.
The event will take place in October 2016 around Scotland and West Wales, and will feature more than 50 vehicles, sensors and systems participating in a range of exercises.
One of the key participants will be Thales, with the Watchkeeper unmanned air system and the Halcyon unmanned surface vessel from its unmanned technology development.
The Watchkeeper will be deployed in a maritime role using its I-Master radar to track small, fast incoming asymmetric threats, such as jet skis and high speed craft. Watchkeeper has previously only been used for land-tracking operations, such as Afghanistan. Watchkeeper offers the Royal Navy an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance capability with an extended endurance of more than 16 hours, according to Thales.
The Halcyon will demonstrate its remote mine-hunting capabilities after recently completing successful trials of towing a Thales Synthetic Aperture Sonar (T-SAS). Halcyon and T-SAS will be tasked with identifying and mapping undisclosed minefields during the exercise.
The Halcyon is being developed as part of the Thales-led consortium solution for the first phase of the Anglo-French Mine Countermeasures programme to assess the future mine warfare capabilities of the UK and French navies.
The trials have proved the ability of the Halcyon and T-SAS to beam live, high quality sonar images to shore-based operators over long distances.
Eddie Awang, vice-president of Thales intelligence surveillance reconnaissance business, said: "We are already a key sensor provider to the Royal Navy, with many of our systems acting as the eyes and ears of the fleet. Unmanned Warrior is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate and reinforce the fact that we are also global leaders in the field of autonomous technology and the next chapter of maritime operations."
As the system integrator for the Maritime Autonomous Platform Exploitation programme, Thales is also working with industry, the Dstl and the maritime capability branch of the Royal Navy to research integrated command and control in unmanned vehicles in order to reduce the manpower, space and training burden, while maximising effect potential.
An initial demonstrator combat system, Autonomous Control Exploitation and Realisation will be deployed on the vessel Northern River. This will support the navy’s longer term ambition of an open architecture combat system across the future surface fleet.
The event will also feature companies such as BAE Systems, Boeing and Saab.