Navy Setting Stage for Influx Of Autonomous Systems.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: NAVY TECHNOLOGY

Unmanned systems have become ubiquitous throughout the military, but the key to their continued success will be new and more powerful autonomy capabilities that make up the guts of the platforms, officials say.

The Navy--which is pursuing an ambitious unmanned systems plan through a mixture of air, surface and underwater platforms--is working to test and mature those autonomy systems through multiple programs.

These include efforts such as new autonomy standards as well as the standing up of its Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab, said Capt. Pete Small, program manager for unmanned maritime systems at Naval Sea Systems Command.

Updating legacy platforms with new autonomy software codes can be an arduous process, he said during a briefing at the Surface Navy Association's annual conference. To combat that, the Navy is developing an autonomy standard for code development called the unmanned maritime autonomy architecture, or UMAA.

UMAA defines a standard for common services and how developers can package information for a more modular set of codes that can support the advancement, maturation and integration of new autonomy packages, Small said.

It "standardizes the interfaces between the software components in an autonomy baseline on any vehicle, and therefore provides the ability to not only reuse the software on upgraded versions of the same platform, but across platforms and programs without wholesale rewriting all of that code anytime we want to integrate a different sensor or add a different autonomy capability," he said in an interview.

The Navy has been working on the architecture for the past two years, he noted. It has collaborated with the defense industrial base throughout the process and regularly hosts industry days to gather feedback.

That standard will continue to evolve and mature over time, he added.

The Navy has already begun incorporating the architecture into recent autonomy platform contracts. "There's been enough runtime that industry and government and academia...have all become familiar with it," he said.

So far, Small's office has received positive feedback from both large and small companies, he said.

"Industry in general has been very supportive of our efforts to standardize autonomy," he said. With a common standard, there are "a lot more vendors and a lot more opportunities for increased industry participation."

UMAA is critical for the Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab, which was established in 2020.

"We wouldn't be...