The U.S. Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, is poised to announce a 132-feet long robot yacht this April, a state-of-the-art ship that is designed to target enemy submarines in the event of a naval battle. It will purportedly be fully automated, as it requires no human crew to sail.
Dubbed as the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), the autonomous ship was announced by Dr. Arati Prabhakar, director at DARPA, in a roundtable interview with the media Wednesday. It will serve several purposes aside from tracking and trailing the quietest of the enemy submarines. For instance, the Navy is also looking at using the vessel for mine countermeasures and supply delivery, according to Popular Science. Watch its concept video below:
"The objective is to generate a vessel design that exceeds state-of-the art platform performance to provide propulsive overmatch against diesel electric submarines at a fraction of their size and cost," DARPA said in a press statement. The ship will be "deploying systems capable of missions spanning thousands of kilometers of range and months of endurance under a sparse remote supervisory control model."
Since ACTUV is fully automated, it is significantly cheaper to maintain. It will cost around $15,000 to $20,000 per day, as opposed to the $700,000 daily budget for a destroyer, the Pentagon said in its official blog.
