The deadline is approaching for firms to respond to an appeal from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for new uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), including attack drones and UUVs that can be launched from submarines.
Companies which think they can answer the call for small and medium-sized UUVs that meet the requirements from the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) need to submit their initial response before midnight U.S. Eastern Time on Friday (July 25).
The DIU solicitation for “Low-Cost Undersea Effectors” states it is seeking to satisfy “a critical need for affordable small and medium UUVs to enhance its operational capabilities in subsea and seabed warfare, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and expeditionary warfare domains.”
It is seeking two different kinds of what it describes as low-cost, mission-specific drones. The first desired type is a “kinetic, one-way attack UUV” with “the flexibility to be deployed from a government-provided platform or pier.” Its host vessel “can either be surface or housed subsurface and most likely be uncrewed.”
The second type sought is a submarine-based platform capable of “torpedo tube launch and recovery without the use of divers.” Both tethered and untethered solutions will be considered but the UUV “should operate for at least two days and/or 120 nautical miles while operating with a payload.”
The U.S. Navy recently announced that in May this year it had achieved an operational first with the launch and retrieval of a UUV from the torpedo tube of a Virginia-class attack submarine.
The USS Delaware managed the feat while deployed in the U.S. European Command (EUCOM) theatre of operations in experiments conducted out of the Haakonsvern Naval Base in Norway.
The submarine was able to launch and recover a Yellow Moray UUV — a variant of HII’s REMUS 600 system — on three separate sorties each lasting between six and ten hours, without the need for divers to launch and recover the vehicle.
The DIU has pledged to respond to firms it thinks provide “a good match between your solution and our DoD partners” within 30 days to invite them to provide a full proposal: the starting point for a potential prototype contract.
- You can read more about the solicitation on the DIU website and more about the Yellow Moray experiment on the DVIDS website