Fish Net Penetration by UUVs

According to The Navy’s Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Master Plan updated in 2004, UUV’s will perform important, force multiplying missions such as intelligence, surveillance, mine countermeasures, tactical oceanography, navigation and anti-submarine warfare. The missions they perform will be autonomous, low risk, and have low observability which will reduce risk to our forces. UUV’s can penetrate enemy harbors and shallow littoral waters where submarines could be easily detected or which is simply just too shallow to operate. It is predicted that hundreds if not thousands of UUV’s will be required to perform these missions. Often, while operating in littoral waters, UUV’s can be entrapped in fishing nets and other debris incurring delays or even causing mission failure. In response to SBIR solicitation N06-054, Adaptive Methods describes in this proposal the work required in a Phase I effort to develop a design for net penetrating equipment (NPE). The design will be capable of multiple penetrations of various types of fishing nets, will minimize integration with existing designs and be scaleable to fit different size UUV’s which will help them to operate freely in all environments. BENEFITS: Benefits: NPE technology will allow UUV’s, both military and commercial, to operate freely in littoral waters performing critical missions with lower risk, lower cost, and with a much greater probability of success. The risk of UUV’s being unrecoverable due to net entrapment will also be minimized. The number of UUV’s performing these critical missions will dramatically increase in the future, along with the demand for NPE technology. Commercialization: In the near future, estimates of the number of domestic, non-military ships, which could use NPE technology, will easily reach 500. World wide, the total number could easily be 2 to 3 times greater. Future UUV requirements for both the military and commercial sectors will probably be in the thousands which will provide a healthy market for NPE technology.