Fish Net Penetration by UUVs

UUVs will perform important, force multiplying missions such as intelligence, surveillance, mine countermeasures, tactical oceanography, navigation and anti-submarine warfare. The missions they perform will be autonomous, low risk, and have low observability which will reduce risk to our forces. It is predicted that hundreds if not thousands of UUVs will be required to perform these missions. While operating in littoral waters UUVs can be entrapped in fishing nets and other debris incurring delays or even causing mission failure or loss or the UUV. In response to a SBIR solicitation N06-054 Phase II invitation, Adaptive Methods describes in this proposal the work required in a Phase II effort to integrate, install, and test net penetrating equipment (NPE) on a vehicle with vehicle control provided by Vehicle Control Technologies (VCT) and Alaskan Native Technologies (ANT). Adaptive Methods also describes the work required to integrate this NPE with a forward looking sonar (FLS) UUV section to prepare it for integration into a US Navy light-weight class UUV. The NPE design will be capable of multiple penetrations of various types of fishing nets, will minimize integration with existing vehicles, and will be scaleable to fit different classes of UUVs.