Northrop Grumman demonstrates autonomous system that can attack submarines

This year’s Annual Naval Technology Exercise (ANTX) at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, featured a demonstration of Northrop Grumman's new cross-domain approaches for autonomous surface, undersea and air vehicles, for use against enemy submarines.

 

"Integration of our proven autonomous systems across the different maritime environments will enable a shared allied network and common operating picture for enhanced maritime domain awareness, which remains a challenge," Northrop Grumman Autonomous Systems Vice President Brian Chappel said.

The demonstration featured a multi-vehicle collaborative autonomous system-of-systems engaging with submerged targets. Undersea, surface and air vehicles collected data on the targets, which were autonomously fused in a real-time tracking solution, allowing a surrogate autonomous air vehicle to engage the submerged target with a replica torpedo for the first time. Together, the autonomous vehicles were able to search, detect, track, classify and engage the targets.

"Northrop Grumman continues to invest to broaden the capabilities of individual autonomous systems and expand the ability of those unmanned systems to inter-operate effectively to perform missions," Alan Lytle, vice president for undersea systems at Northrop Grumman, said. "Our mission-level autonomy allows heterogeneous autonomous systems to understand the unfolding mission and dynamically re-task themselves without human intervention."