US Navy Developing Underwater/Flying Drones For Submarines

The US Navy is working on both underwater and flying drones to support its submarines, according to local media reports.

The US Navy has started working on deploying Remus 600 Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) performing undersea missions in strategic locations, Rear Adm. Joseph Tofalo was quoted as saying by Military.com during the Navy League's Sea Air Space annual symposium at National Harbor, Md on Monday.

"Now you are talking about a submarine CO who can essentially be in two places at the same time – with a UUV out deployed which can do dull, dirty and dangerous type missions. This allows the submarine to be doing something else at the same time," Tofalo said.

"UUVs can help us better meet our combatant command demand signal. Right now, we only meet about two-thirds of our combatant commanders demand signals and having unmanned systems is a huge force multiplier."

The US Navy is also working on a submarine-fighting drone, Flimmer or flying swimmer that can operate both in the air and underwater, Fox News reported earlier this month.

After successfully examining the performance of a “Test Sub” that combined a traditional submarine shape with a traditional aircraft shape, scientists  applied their findings to a flying version of the  NRL’s WANDA (Wrasse-inspired Agile Near-shore Deformable-fin Automaton ) drone.

“Experimentation with the Flying WANDA configuration continues,” Dan Edwards of the NRL’s Electronic Warfare Division wrote in NRL’s Spectra Magazine. “Future flights will explore the performance envelope using the fins as active control surfaces in the air and will continue the landing work.”

Remus 600 is a 500 pound, 3.25 meter long UUV and is equipped with dual-frequency side scanning sonar synthetic aperture sonar, acoustic imaging, video cameras and GPS devices.

Remus 600 is similar to BLUEFIN 21, that were used to scan the ocean floor in search of the wreckage of the downed Malaysian airliner last year.

"We're using commercial off-the-shelf technologies to do real world missions for the combatant commander. The sensors are similar to the sensors that the oil and gas industry might use. They might be surveying where their oil pipes are, whereas we might want to be looking for a mine field," Tofalo said.

The Remus 600s will launch from a 11-meter long module on the Virginia-class submarines called the dry deck shelter which can launch divers and UUVs while submerged.