AUCKLAND: Enamored with a vision of a future fleet of autonomous air, ground, surface and underwater vehicles, Britain’s Royal Navy is investing in the creation of a Naval Strike Network, designed to provide the command-and-control backbone for its unmanned systems. For that to work, it needs a brain: a program known as the Maritime Autonomous Platform Exploitation, or MAPLE, with which the baseline information architecture that the UK needs for any of its ambitious plans for unmanned platforms come to reality. The program, run through the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Lab (DSTL), started in 2016 and has been used in exercises such as Unmanned Warrior in 2016, Autonomous Warrior in 2018, Autonomous Advanced Force in 2019, and most recently Robotic Experimentation and Prototyping in 2021 (REP 2021) as well as its own smaller events where experiments were conducted to prove how the system can become the baseline architecture for unmanned systems. Now in its fifth iteration, th
Unmanned Underwater Vehicles: Defence and Technology Trends
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USAF awards autonomous target contract to US-UK team
12 February 2021
by Melanie Rovery
The US Air Force (USAF) has awarded a nine-month contract to US company Mountain Horse Solutions and UK companies Digital Concepts Engineering (DCE) and tpgroup to jointly develop and demonstrate fully autonomous targets.
A remotely operated Warrior fitted with the Marionette system was demonstrated at the Salisbury Plain Training Area during the Autonomous Warrior 2018 Army Warfighting Experiment (AWE18). (Janes/Melanie Rovery)
The three companies said in a joint press release on 9 February that they would develop and build a fully autonomous prototype target that will be demonstrated to the USAF during the second quarter of this year. The companies hope the demonstration contract can be converted into a long-term supply contract for up to 10 years.