Deployable Autonomous Undersea Burial System

Bottom mounted undersea surveillance systems are required by the Navy to Detect, Classify and Localize (DCL) underwater threats during operations and intelligence gathering. To meet the needs of future naval operations they must be easily deployable from a number of platforms and autonomously perform the DCL mission and autonomously report. The primary risks to these bottom mounted surveillance systems is survivability against fishing threat and the ability to power the system for months of duration. Burial is performed for commercial bottom mounted cabled systems by large sled-type vehicles towed from a mother ship. This approach is neither rapid nor clandestine enough to meet the needs of the Navy. A"fire and forget"approach to deployment is required. Progeny Systems Corporation teamed with the University of California San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography will research and design THETIS a deployable vehicle which will autonomously install the undersea surveillance array and protect it by burying it in the seafloor. This will be accomplished by packaging the array into a deployable canister that includes a plow share and feedpath mechanism. The cable and array would be fed through this device as the autonomous vehicle pulls it along and thereby bury and protect the cable.