Expendable Array Installation System

The U.S. Navy has been working toward rapidly deployable acoustic surveillance as off-board sensors for over thirty years. Wireless connectivity to an off-board acoustic sensor will make this possible. The Advanced Deployable System (ADS) is close to providing this capability, but is in need of an autonomous Expendable Array Installation Vehicle (ExAIV) to make it a reality. Progeny Systems Corporation with its teammate Ocean Systems Inc. (OSI) has identified innovative approaches, performed research, defined requirements and developed a preliminary design to build and test a prototype ExAIV. The focus was on keeping the ExAIV as inexpensive and reliable as possible for one time use, with the capability to deploy it after 5 years of storage with little or no maintenance. Innovative manufacturing techniques for the buoyancy tank, thrusters and covers, combined with the use of all COTS components will significantly reduce unit cost and simplify assembly. This reduction in life-cycle cost can be accomplished by taking advantage of the fact that the ExAIV has a very short mission life and is thus expendable. The dynamic system vehicle control software will be modeled and analyzed using Matlab/Simulink and then be ported to the PC-104 processing target in a rapid prototype environment.