New military underwater drone launchers hitch rides on ships and submarine hulls

Naval warfare goes a bit clingy as Lockheed Martin unveils its robotic Lamprey Multi-Mission Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (MMAUV), which can hitch a ride on friendly ships or submarines by latching onto their hulls to conserve power.

Autonomous robotic submarines are very much in fashion as naval planners work on future strategies in which underwater drones play a key part in patrolling and monitoring the world's oceans. They're seen as a potential force multiplier and as a way of casting a huge sensor net over vast distances. But that means going well beyond simply making an uncrewed boat that can pilot itself.

Lamprey is intended not only to help bridge the gap toward true multi-mission MMAUVs, but also to make them more practical for long-range operations far from base. To achieve this, Lamprey steals a page from fish such as lampreys and remoras, which attach themselves to larger animals either to feed or to hitch a ride while enjoying protection and scraps of food.

See it in action.

In the case of the robotic Lamprey, the rectangular craft is equipped with suction cups or a docking mechanism that allows it to latch onto the hull of a ship or submarine. This not only allows it to conserve energy but to actually generate it by means of integrated hydro-generators, which is an upmarket way of saying turbo-generators. These are similar to the towed power units sometimes pulled behind yachts to generate electricity from the boat's forward motion, like a pinwheel stuck out a car window.

Using such an arrangement, Lockheed Martin claims that the Lamprey can reach its mission area with its batteries 100% charged to run the craft's quad-thruster propulsion system, autonomous onboard computers, sensors, and subsystems. It also has a mast for surface and subsea communications.

Once on station, what the Lamprey does depends on its payload. Since it's an open-architecture system that is payload agnostic, it can carry any manner of modules for any number of missions in its 24-cubic-ft (0.68-cubic-m) bay. This includes lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes, up to three retractable twin-tube aerial drone launchers, electronic warfare systems, acoustic decoys that can mimic other craft, and deployable sensors for intelligence gathering,

In fact, one Lamprey party trick is the ability for groups of them to sit quietly on the seabed watching and waiting as they gather data until they are given the command to upload what they have learned, move to a new destination, or even go on the attack against a passing target.

“The modern battlespace demands platforms that hide, adapt and dominate,” said Paul Lemmo, vice president and general manager of Sensors, Effectors & Mission Systems at Lockheed Martin. “Lamprey MMAUV was internally funded, letting us iterate at lightning speed and hand the Navy a true multi mission weapon that detects, disrupts, decoys and engages on its own."

Source: Lockheed Martin