Royal Australian Air Force and US Air Force technicians on the tools together

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  December 4, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  The US Air Force wants to buy a big robot to help with bomb disposal

  By: Valerie Insinna and Jen Judson UPDATE — This story has been updated to add comment from L3Harris on its participation in the competition. WASHINGTON — A year after the U.S. Army awarded a contract to build a heavy-duty robot able to dispose of bombs and other explosives, the Air Force is looking for its own system — and it wants to see what's on the market before committing to purchasing what the Army buys. The Air Force in October released a solicitation for a large explosive ordnance disposal robot, a commercial off-the-shelf system equipped with a maneuverable arm and a camera system that can function in all terrain types, environments and weather conditions. An Air Force spokesman declined to confirm how many companies submitted bids for the program, which were due Nov. 20. One competitor has already come forward: FLIR, which is set to rake in as much as $109 million building its Kobra robot for the Army's Common Robotic System-Heavy program. The company began full-rate production of Kobra last month and is confident the Air Force will follow the Army's example by choosing the same system. “As the chosen provider for the Army's Common Robotic System-Heavy (CRS-H) program, FLIR believes its extensively tested and proven unmanned ground system meets the Air Force needs in the large EOD robot category, while enabling commonality of equipment with other services' EOD forces,” said Tom Frost, who runs FLIR's unmanned ground systems business. QinetiQ, which lost out to FLIR in the CRS-H competition, did not respond to a query about whether it had bid on the Air Force program. An L3Harris spokesperson confirmed to Defense News that it had submitted its T7 EOD robot to the Air Force competition. L3Harris said it wanted to be chosen for the CRS-H program in 2018. The company unveiled the robot at the Association of the US Army's annual conference in 2016 letting show attendees take a crack at operating the arm on the robot. The controller looks like the back end of a gun making it easy to hold, and is hooked to sensors that transfer information to the robotic arm on the T7. The United Kingdom is a customer of the T7 for EOD missions. At times, the Air Force has joined Army robot programs without needing to hold a competition. But in the case of larger EOD robots, the two services have differing requirements that have led the Air Force to seek out its own system instead of jumping into the CRS-H program, said S. Chase Cooper, a contracting officer who is managing the EOD robot solicitation on behalf of the Air Force's 772nd Enterprise Sourcing Squadron “The major difference is that the Army's mission is primarily to operate ‘outside the wire' ” — that is, outside of a secure military installation — “where the Air Force's mission is primarily ‘inside the wire.' These are two entirely different environments,” he said in a statement to Defense News. Cooper also pointed to additional considerations such as the size and weight of the system. Most Air Force EOD missions occur after bombs or other improvised explosive devices are found at a base or installation. When that happens, teams load robots and other gear into a Base Response Vehicle or Bomb Squad Emergency Response Vehicle, drive out to the location of the explosive device, and safely dispose of the explosive. Whatever robot the Air Force chooses must be small enough to fit inside those vehicles, Cooper said. That includes passing through a 32-inch-wide door opening and parking into a space 91 inches long and 63 inches high. The Air Force's requirement for weight, which is set at a maximum of 1,000 pounds, is less stringent than the Army's 700-pound limit. The Air Force also called for a system with a minimum 800-meter, line-of-sight radio range, and a 3-hour runtime that will allow it complete the majority of EOD missions. Cooper noted that the Air Force's decision to pursue an open competition does not preclude the FLIR robot from being chosen by the service. “It is unknown at this time if that system would meet our requirements,” Cooper said. “Through our contracting process, we are evaluating all of the proposed large robot systems against the Air Force's requirement so we can make sure the system we purchase is the best one for our airmen.” The Air Force has a history of both collaborating with the Army on EOD robots and going its own way. For its medium-sized unmanned ground vehicle, the Air Force opted to use the Army's existing contract under the Man Transportable Robotic System Increment II program for FLIR's Centaur UGV, which is also being purchased by the Navy and Marine Corps. But while QinetiQ beat out FLIR in the Army's competition for CRS-Individual — a man-packable robot that is less than 25 pounds — the Air Force ended up pursuing a separate contract to meet its own unique needs for small unmanned ground vehicles. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2020/12/03/the-air-force-wants-to-buy-a-big-robot-to-help-with-bomb-disposal/

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  June 2, 2020 | International, Naval

  US Navy embraces robot ships, but some unresolved issues are holding them back

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. military is banking on unmanned surface and subsurface vessels to boost its capacity in the face of a tsunami of Chinese naval spending. But before it can field the systems, it must answer some basic questions. How will these systems deploy? How will they be supported overseas? Who will support them? Can the systems be made sufficiently reliable to operate alone and unafraid on the open ocean for weeks at a time? Will the systems be able to communicate in denied environments? As the Navy goes all-in on its unmanned future, with billions of dollars of investments planed, how the service answers those questions will be crucial to the success or failure of its unmanned pivot. Many of those issues fall to the Navy's program manager for unmanned maritime systems, Capt. Pete Small. As the Navy puzzles out some very basic questions, it must also ponder some big organizational changes to maximize the potential of the platforms once they arrive. “Our infrastructure now is highly optimized around large, very capable, highly manned warships,” Small said at the C4ISRNET Conference in May. “We spend a lot of time and effort preparing them for deployment, and we deploy them overseas for months at a time. They are almost perfectly reliable: We generally send them on a mission, they do it and come back almost without fail. “For these distributed and smaller platforms, we're going to have to shift that infrastructure — how we prepare, deploy, transit over and sustain these smaller platforms in theater.” That question is critical because it will affect the requirements for how the systems are designed at the outset. In the case of the medium and large unmanned surface vessels under development, just how big and how rugged they need to be would depend on how the Navy plans to use them. “All the scenarios we're discussing are far forward,” Small said. “Far from the shores of the continental United States. So there is absolutely a transit somewhere — a long transit — to get these platforms where they need to be. We've got to come through that in a range of ways. “For the medium and large [unmanned surface vessel] USV, in setting up the specifications and establishing what the requirements should be for unmanned surface vessels, crossing an ocean is a critical part of those missions.” Making these platforms cost-effective is almost the entire point of their development, but questions such as “Should we design the vessel to be able to make an Atlantic or Pacific crossing?” can mean a big price difference. “With a medium USV, we're kind of on the edge of whether it's big enough to cross the ocean by itself, and we're learning, you know, how big does it need [to be],” Small said. “You may be able to make it smaller and cheaper to get it to do the job you want it to do ultimately, but if it has to cross the ocean to get there, that might be the overall driving requirement, not the end mission requirement. If you are going to heavy-lift them and bring them over in bulk, well that's a new concept and we have to figure out how we're going to do that," he added. “What ships are we going to use to do that? Where do we operate from overseas? There's a range of options in each case, but in general we're going to have to transition from a system more optimized around our manned fleet infrastructure to a more distributed mix of large, highly manned platforms to smaller unmanned platforms.” Relocatable support The introduction of entirely new platforms that operate without humans onboard mean that the Navy must think about how to support them downrange, Small said. “We're going to need to talk about things like tenders, heavy lift ships and forward-operating bases, things like that,” he said. The idea of an unmanned vessel tender for the medium USV, which the Navy intends to use as a far-forward distributed sensor, is likely the best solution, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a retired submarine officer. “I think it's likely that they'll be heavy-lifted into the theater, not because they can't make it themselves but because in general it would be less wear and tear on the vessels,” he said. “You want that support to be relocatable as opposed to a group of guys working out of a building ashore. The whole purpose of them is to be flexible; and because they're small, that would, in theory, give you lots of options as to remote locations you could operate from.” The tender could be adapted from an existing platform in the sealift fleet for now, and ultimately procured as new later, Clark said, adding that the ship would need cranes and a platform near the waterline to support the medium USV and perhaps the planned extra-large unmanned undersea vehicle as well. Additionally, the vessels should be stationed where the Navy has long-standing relationships, like Singapore, Souda Bay, Greece, Britain and the like, as well as where they are likely to operate. The Marine Corps' transition from a heavy force concentrated on large amphibious ships to a lighter force distributed around smaller ships and lighter amphibs may free up some platforms for porting unmanned vessels around the globe. “As we change the deployment schemes for amphibious ships, that may afford the opportunity to have amphibs with well decks that are not full of Marines' equipment but with unmanned vessels,” he said. Reliability For Small, the questions that are most immediate are how to make the systems dependable. “We plan to send these systems out to sailors who are at the forefront of the fight, and we need these systems to work every time and be reliable,” he said. “So, reliability is a fundamental issue associated with autonomous vehicles.” Questions have been raised about things as basic as whether the Navy can get a marine diesel engine to run for days and potentially weeks without being touched by humans. But Small said that's not what he spends a lot of time worrying about. “For me, I think there is plenty of technology there and it will get better. I'm less concerned with, ‘Will the engine run long enough?' and more concerned with the reliability of the system as a whole,” he said. “The autonomy running that vessel is a key aspect of the overall reliability of the system. So there's a code and software aspect to this, but there is also the interface between that code and the hull, mechanical and electrical systems that we have on ships.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the human ability to detect subtle changes in the equipment they operate that is the toughest to replicate, Small said. “It's about self-awareness and the ability to self-diagnose problems and changing conditions associated with that equipment and react to those changing conditions,” he explained. “That's either by alerting an operator or having an autonomous response that allows the mission to continue. “A sailor would sense a vibration; a sailor would hear abnormal noise; a sailor would see something getting warmer, do the diagnostics and take actions. ... There's as strong a relationship between that and the overall reliability of those physical systems themselves.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2020/06/01/us-navy-embraces-robot-ships-but-some-unresolved-issues-are-holding-them-back/

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  September 15, 2022 | International, Other Defence

  Supply chain woes hurting nuclear modernization, Cotton tells Senate

  "It's going to take everyone to understand how to close the gap on supply chain management."