Design Challenges of a Maritime Multipurpose Unmanned Vehicle

P Lopes,M Moreira,P Silva Da Pires

doi:10.1088/1755-1315/172/1/012024

Abstract

Military Navies have several missions in which due to their complex, dangerous, or disaster scenarios, unmanned vehicles are suitable to perform the necessary tasks. Besides other issues it is a current subject of research the trade-off between using many mission oriented unmanned vehicles or the use of less number of more robust and versatile multimission vehicles. Challenged by the technological advances achieved in mobile robotics and unmanned vehicles, and the need to develop in house know-how, this project aimed to put into practice the development of a concept design of a multimission unmanned surface vehicle, that can operate individually or cooperate with other systems whose development will be done in parallel on other projects.This unmanned vehicle, designated Unmanned Surface Vehicle for the Portuguese Navy - USV – PoN is part of project based oriented learning strategy in development in the Portuguese Naval Academy. It poses particular challenges related to the broad spectrum of the concept of operations, such as mine warfare operations, port surveillance and protection operations, search and rescue operations, hydrographic data collection operations. All of these operations demand different and challenging missions and tasks, to which the concept design of the USV-PoN will answer in terms of feasibility studies and possible configurations.The purpose of this work is to address the challenges that the concept of operations and corresponding technical specifications put into the design of the USV-PoN and show how to overcome them making the study and analysis necessary for the production of a prototype based on the concept design.Out of the scope of this work were aspects related to sensor development and integration as well as the command and control of the vehicle.

Highlights

Due to the different missions and tasks undertaken by the military Navies, in complex, dangerous and disaster scenarios, it is necessary to reduce the risk to its military and increase responsiveness to different threats, in any type of scenario
As part of a line of research with interest to the CINAV (Naval Research Center) and the strategic plan of the Portuguese Navy, it was started in 2017 the development of the conceptual design of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV)
This vehicle is possibly intended to be an ocean-going platform. As such its design as any novel design is a complex and challenging activity. It demands a large spectrum of knowledge on diverse scientific areas combined with an iteration process that takes the designer through the same design detail several times, as needed to improve the object of design up to the point where the constraints of adequacy, feasibility and acceptability are met

Summary

Introduction

Due to the different missions and tasks undertaken by the military Navies, in complex, dangerous and disaster scenarios, it is necessary to reduce the risk to its military and increase responsiveness to different threats, in any type of scenario. As part of a line of research with interest to the CINAV (Naval Research Center) and the strategic plan of the Portuguese Navy, it was started in 2017 the development of the conceptual design of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV). This vehicle is possibly intended to be an ocean-going platform. As such its design as any novel design is a complex and challenging activity. Other way to put it is to apply an iteration process that improves slightly the design up to obtain an optimum, as Evans H. explains in his well-known Design Spiral [1]

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Conclusion