December 14, 2016
THE PEACE DIVIDEND IS GINORMOUS:
The US Navy's Autonomous Swarm Boats Can Now Decide What to Attack : An autonomous Navy vessel performing a demonstration on the Chesapeake Bay in September. (PATRICK TUCKER, 12/14/16, Defense One)
A Sept. 6-Oct. 3 test in the lower Chesapeake Bay demonstrated several new capabilities that will "open up the aperture" for more missions, said ONR program manager Robert Brizzolara.One was "enhanced vessel classification," the boats' ability to separate friend from foe, using images fed into CARACaS. No small task, this advance required new research and development into target classification."We looked at a relatively large number of automated target recognition approaches...taking algorithms for [automated target recognition] and using them in our maritime environment was not straightforward," said Brizzolara. "In the end, we finally came up with an approach that works very well."But the boats can also evaluate potential threats based on their behaviors; for example, taking note of how close a suspect vessel is getting to a port, ship, or other asset. This capability, which was not demonstrated in the recent tests, allows new images and behaviors to be entered into the boats' threat library.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2016 5:00 PM