Meet GhostSwimmer: The U.S. Navy’s Fish-Inspired Unmanned Underwater Vehicle
@satya-swaroop-YDeBJM
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Oct 21, 2024
Oct 21, 2024
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When you think of military drones you immediately look up to the sky, but there is one other frontier that needs monitoring and that is water. Since there are tons of drones for the Army and Air Force, the US Navy has decided to acquire one for itself to help it stealthy monitor the high seas. The unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) for the US Navy has been built by Boston Engineering's Advanced Systems Group and has been christened GhostSwimmer. The US Navy has announced that it has successfully tested the UUV at the Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story last week. GhostSwimmer was developed under the Silent NEMO experiment of the US Navy’s chief of naval operations' Rapid Innovation Cell (CRIC) that explores the possibilities of biomimetic underwater vehicles.
The GhostSwimmer’s design has been inspired by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albacore" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Albacore</a> but it looks eerily similar to a shark. It weighs 100 pounds and measures 5 feet in length. GhostSwimmer swims just like a fish does by oscillating its tail fin back and forth. This makes the UUV perfect for low visibility intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions and friendly hull inspections. The team says that the GhostSwimmer is quieter than propeller driven crafts of the same size. The GhostSwimmer can operate at depths of up to 300 feet. The GhostSwimmer operates in two modes. First we have the autonomous mode in which the drone operates by itself without a tether and transmits the data by resurfacing at sea level. In the second mode the UUV is controlled by a human controller with a laptop and 500-foot tether. In this mode the craft does not need to resurface to transmit the data. The US Navy has avoided mentioning the kind of surveillance equipment fitted on the GhostSwimmer.
To know more about the GhostSwimmer head over to the US Navy’s #-Link-Snipped-# section and its coverage on #-Link-Snipped-#.
The GhostSwimmer’s design has been inspired by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albacore" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Albacore</a> but it looks eerily similar to a shark. It weighs 100 pounds and measures 5 feet in length. GhostSwimmer swims just like a fish does by oscillating its tail fin back and forth. This makes the UUV perfect for low visibility intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions and friendly hull inspections. The team says that the GhostSwimmer is quieter than propeller driven crafts of the same size. The GhostSwimmer can operate at depths of up to 300 feet. The GhostSwimmer operates in two modes. First we have the autonomous mode in which the drone operates by itself without a tether and transmits the data by resurfacing at sea level. In the second mode the UUV is controlled by a human controller with a laptop and 500-foot tether. In this mode the craft does not need to resurface to transmit the data. The US Navy has avoided mentioning the kind of surveillance equipment fitted on the GhostSwimmer.
To know more about the GhostSwimmer head over to the US Navy’s #-Link-Snipped-# section and its coverage on #-Link-Snipped-#.