Jane Edwards
Lockheed Martin demonstrated its two unmanned vehicles at the U.S. Navy’s Annual Navy Technology Exercise held in August at Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
Both Vector Hawk and Marlin vehicles worked together with Submaran to perform situational awareness functions through transmission of operational status data to the ground control station during the ANTX event, Lockheed said Wednesday.
The Lockheed-built Marlin MK2 autonomous underwater vehicle deployed the company’s Vector Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle to perform a mission flight track after the Ocean Aero-made Submaran unmanned surface vehicle relayed ground control station-derived instructions to Marlin through underwater acoustic communications.
Kevin Schlosser, chief architect of unmanned systems technology at Lockheed, said the company’s demonstration at the ANTX event sought to showcase unmanned vehicles’ communication functions across domains.
The Marlin MK2 AUV is a 10-foot-long system that has a payload capacity of up to 250 pounds and works to perform inspections up to 1,000 feet below for up to 24 hours.
The Vector Hawk UAV is a four-pound platform that has an open architecture built to facilitate payload and technology integration and is designed to fly for at least 70 minutes to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.
Ocean Aero’s Submaran USV works to perform surface surveillance and reconnaissance functions.
