Augmenting the Existing Fleet

CAMBRIDGE, MA—In the future, the U.S. military will rely increasingly on offboard systems, such as autonomous undersea vehicles, to augment existing, onboard platforms. Those offboard systems will need to be affordable, which implies a move toward open architecture, low cost designs.

To help the U.S. military more quickly move in this direction, Draper has reached an agreement with Riptide Autonomous Solutions to implement Maritime Open Architecture Autonomy (MOAA) on all Riptide unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) delivered to the U.S. government.

Draper developed MOAA for the U.S. government as an extensible open architecture framework for autonomous mission controllers for autonomous undersea vehicles (AUVs). MOAA capabilities have been demonstrated at sea on multiple AUV classes with capabilities applicable to various undersea mission areas.

Draper has requested and received approval from the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport (NUWC-NPT) to provide MOAA as an option on all Riptide UUVs sold to the U.S. Government or Government-purposed vehicles.

“Autonomous undersea vehicles are growing in importance for commercial and national security purposes. Along with this, open architecture systems such as MOAA meet the need for greater flexibility—in mission design, operation and resource deployment,” said Joel Parry, Draper’s maritime warfare and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) lead.