Multirotor Unmanned Air / Underwater Vehicle for Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and Mine Countermeasures (MCM)

Team SubUAS, the STTR partnership between SubUAS LLC and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, have developed the first drone to operate seamlessly between air, surface and water mediums. On this proposed effort, our multirotor unmanned aerial/underwater vehicle (MUA/UV) will be scaled to carry a payload of 10-30 pounds. Team SubUAS will build, test and develop simulated concept of operations pertinent to the Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) and Mine Countermeasure (MCM) communities. Team SubUAS will investigate HUA/UVs operating under tethered control, hybrid Radio Frequency (RF) tethered operations and fully autonomous operations. At the end of Phase II, Team SubUAS will perform the following sequence take off, land in water and image an underwater target at depths of 5-40ft in the water column, and resume flight in air. We will repeat this sequence up to 10 times before returning to the initial site of launch. During the Option period, Team SubUAS will continue to refine our MUA/UV through testing and lessons learned in varied, real-world environments and increase operational safety using data-driven decisions.