Darpa enters phase 2 of the program No Manning Required Ship (Nomars) which aims to create a new unmanned surface vessel capable of operating for a year at sea. After selecting a project, the next step will be to build the boat and test it.
Darpa, the US Department of Defense research agency, has just announced that it is moving into phase two of its autonomous boat Nomars (No Manning Required Ship). The goal is to completely redesign the ships that will have to operate entirely without human beings on board. Darpa intends to deploy fleets of autonomous ships to support US Navy ships.
The first phase was the selection of a concept, and Serco was the winner. The British company has developed a software solution, DSX (Design Space Exploration), able to take into account the different parameters in order to generate a multitude of ship designs. The results were then refined to arrive at a single proposal, dubbed Defiant.
Ships that will have to last a year without maintenance
Defiant will be a 210 ton boat, of the Musv class (unmanned medium surface craft). The device must be able to operate permanently at sea without any crew, with automated resupply and no maintenance during long missions.
The Nomars program is based on the concept of “graceful degradation” where, thanks to the redundancy of the systems, the failure of one piece of equipment does not lead to the shutdown of the boat. He must be able to continue to carry out his mission and move to a speed of 15 knots after spending a year at sea. The main components of the system will have to be modularized so that they can be changed easily in yacht shipyards around the world. In the second phase, Serco will finalize, build and test itsvesselbefore proceeding to a three-month sea demonstration.
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