9 septembre 2020 | International, Fabrication avancée 4.0
9/8/2020
By Yasmin Tadjdeh
Over the past few years, the Navy has been hard at work building a new family of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles through a variety of prototyping efforts. It is now standing up an integration lab to enable the platforms with increased autonomy, officials said Sept. 8.
The Rapid Integration Autonomy Lab, or RAIL, is envisioned as a place where the Navy can bring in and test new autonomous capabilities for its robotic vehicles, said Capt. Pete Small, program manager for unmanned maritime systems.
“Our Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab concept is really the playground where all the autonomy capabilities and sensors and payloads come together, both to be integrated ... [and] to test them from a cybersecurity perspective and test them from an effectiveness perspective,” Small said during the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's Unmanned Systems conference, which was held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
Robotics technology is moving at a rapid pace, and platforms will need to have their software and hardware components replaced throughout their lifecycles, he said. In order to facilitate these upgrades, the service will need to integrate the new autonomy software that comes with various payloads and certain autonomy mission capabilities with the existing nuts-and-bolts packages already in the unmanned platforms.
“The Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab is where we bring together the platform software, the payload software, the mission software and test them,” he explained.
During testing, the service will be able to validate the integration of the software as well as predict the performance of the unmanned vehicles in a way that “we're sure that this is going to work out and give us the capability we want,” Small said.
The RAIL concept will rely on modeling-and-simulation technology with software-in-the-loop testing to validate the integration of various autonomous behaviors, sensors and payloads, he said.
“We will rely heavily on industry to bring those tools to the RAIL to do the testing that we require,” he noted.
However, the lab is not envisioned as a single, brick-and-mortar facility, but rather a network of cloud-based infrastructure and modern software tools. “There will be a certain footprint of the actual software developers who are doing that integration, but we don't see this as a big bricks-and-mortar effort. It's really more of a collaborative effort of a number of people in this space to go make this happen," Small said.
The service has kicked off a prototype effort as part of the RAIL initiative where it will take what it calls a “third-party autonomy behavior” that has been developed by the Office of Naval Research and integrate it onto an existing unmanned underwater vehicle that runs on industry-made proprietary software, Small said. Should that go as planned, the Navy plans to apply the concept to numerous programs.
For now, the RAIL is a prototyping effort, Small said.
“We're still working on developing the budget profile and ... the details behind it,” he said. “We're working on building the programmatic efforts behind it that really are in [fiscal year] '22 and later.”
The RAIL is part of a series of “enablers” that will help the sea service get after new unmanned technology, Small said. Others include a concept known as the unmanned maritime autonomy architecture, or UMAA, a common control system and a new data strategy.
Cmdr. Jeremiah Anderson, deputy program manager for unmanned underwater vehicles, said an upcoming industry day on Sept. 24 that is focused on UMAA will also feature information about the RAIL.
“Half of that day's agenda will really be to get into more of the nuts and bolts about the RAIL itself and about that prototyping effort that's happening this year,” he said. “This is very early in the overall trajectory for the RAIL, but I think this will be a good opportunity to kind of get that message out a little bit more broadly to the stakeholders and answer their questions.”
Meanwhile, Small noted that the Navy is making strides within its unmanned portfolio, citing a “tremendous amount of progress that we've made across the board with our entire family of UVS and USVs.”
Rear Adm. Casey Moton, program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants, highlighted efforts with the Ghost Fleet Overlord and Sea Hunter platforms, which are unmanned surface vessels.
The Navy — working in cooperation with the office of the secretary of defense and the Strategic Capabilities Office — has two Overlord prototypes. Fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1, will be a particularly important period for the platforms, he said.
“Our two Overlord vessels have executed a range of autonomous transits and development vignettes,” he said. “We have integrated autonomy software automation systems and perception systems and tested them in increasingly complex increments and vignettes since 2018.”
Testing so far has shown the platforms have the ability to perform safe, autonomous navigation in according with the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, or COLREGS, at varying speeds and sea states, he said.
“We are pushing the duration of transits increasingly longer, and we will soon be working up to 30 days,” he said. “Multi-day autonomous transits have occurred in low- and high-traffic density environments.”
The vessels have already had interactions with commercial fishing fleets, cargo vessels and recreational craft, he said.
The longest transit to date includes a round trip from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast where it conducted more than 181 hours and over 3,193 nautical miles of COLREGS-compliant, autonomous operation, Moton added.
Both Overload vessels are slated to conduct extensive testing and experimentation in fiscal year 2021, he said.
“These tests will include increasingly long-range transits with more complex autonomous behaviors,” he said. "They will continue to demonstrate automation functions of the machinery control systems, plus health monitoring by a remote supervisory operation center with the expectation of continued USV reliability."
The Sea Hunter will also be undergoing numerous fleet exercises and tactical training events in fiscal year 2021.
“With the Sea Hunter and the Overlord USVs we will exercise ... control of multiple USVs, test command-and-control, perform as part of surface action groups and train Navy sailors on these platforms, all while developing and refining the fleet-led concept of operations and concept of employment,” Moton said.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/9/8/navy-testing-new-autonomy-integration-lab
27 mai 2020
Startup Genome a fait un rapport en anglais qui livre une analyse des impacts de la COVID-19 sur les tendances de financement des startups avec l'étude des levées de fonds du premiers tours à travers le monde: Amérique, Europe, Afrique, Moyen Orient et Asie.
18 septembre 2020
Par Pierre Cheminade Défendre et promouvoir la position de la région bordelaise dans la compétition mondiale de la mobilité spatiale, c'est l'ambition du SpaceHub lancé conjointement par des acteurs publics et privés dont la Région Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Bordeaux Métropole, ArianeGroup et Dassault Aviation. Malgré la vente d'avions Rafale à la Grèce, qui bénéficiera directement à l'usine Dassault de Mérignac, la filière régionale de l'aéronautique-spatial-défense (ASD) a bien besoin de signaux positifs dans un contexte compliqué, tout particulièrement pour les avionneurs civils et leurs sous-traitants. Alors que Technowest vient de lancer un appel à projets pour repérer et accompagner trois nouvelles startups de l'ASD, le conseil régional de Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Bordeaux Métropole, Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, ArianeGroup et Dassault Aviation se mobilisent pour fédérer les énergies en matière spatiale. Une nouvelle initiative après que la présidence bordelaise de la Communauté des villes Ariane en 2020 a subi le confinement et la crise sanitaire de plein fouet tout comme le festival Big Bang. La démarche SpaceHub, présentée le 7 septembre en présence d'une myriade de partenaires publics et privés (*), vise à ainsi à démontrer que le territoire tient son rang en matière de mobilités spatiales dans un contexte plus concurrentiel que jamais avec les progrès à marche forcée réalisés par les acteurs du New Space. Lire aussi : Le New Space veut faire de l'espace un business comme les autres Et le nouveau né Spacehub affiche ses ambitions sans détour : "Êre un acteur d'excellence de niveau international dans le domaine de la mobilité spatiale, en particulier les vols suborbitaux, le transport spatial et la rentrée atmosphérique". close volume_off Deux activités seront développées de concert pour mêler étroitement recherche fondamentale et applications concrètes : un centre d'analyse prospective dédié à la mobilité spatiale travaillant avec les universités et grandes écoles françaises et internationales ainsi qu'avec les agences spatiales, civiles et de défense ; un centre d'exploration et d'accélération des concepts spatiaux "pour aboutir rapidement aux meilleures solutions, obtenir des financements associés à ses projets innovants et générer de nouvelles opportunités d'affaires." Le tout dans une logique d'ouverture et de collaboration. Une démarche qui s'inscrit également dans une logique de relance économique à moyen terme tant les innovations et technologies développées initialement pour le spatial se traduisent, dans un second temps, dans l'économie et les usages plus grand public, de la communication à la santé en passant par l'environnement et la mobilité. Lire aussi : "La Lune est un très bon terrain d'entraînement avant d'aller sur Mars" (*) Les partenaires industriels du projet (ArianeGroup et Dassault Aviation), le CEA, les représentants de l'écosystème de la recherche (Université de Bordeaux, CNRS, Inria, Chaire défense & aérospatial de Sciences Po Bordeaux, etc.), des acteurs majeurs soutenant le projet (Thales, Cnes, Nouvelle-Aquitaine Academic Space Center, l'association Hyfar-Ara et la Fondation Bordeaux Université). https://objectifaquitaine.latribune.fr/business/aeronautique-et-defense/2020-09-17/avec-spacehub-la-region-bordelaise-veut-tenir-son-rang-dans-la-mobilite-spatiale-857467.html
15 février 2021
Mark Pomerleau CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified the organization soliciting white papers as the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command. WASHINGTON — The Navy is searching for solutions from industry that can fill needed gaps in cyber warfare capabilities to secure weapon systems and exploit cyberspace. The Naval Air Systems Command Cyber Warfare Detachment is looking for white papers for research and development efforts on resilient cyber warfare capabilities, according to a Feb. 11 posting to a government contracting website. The proposals should offer advancements or improvements to fill gaps, the notice stated, listing eight buckets of technological interests: Size-, weight- and power-sensitive cyber resiliency for real-time operating systems and aviation warfare environment Access point identification, prioritization and defense Cyber-electronic warfare convergent capabilities Full acquisition cycle cybersecurity measures Cyber test, inspection and incident response concepts Cyber warning system techniques Cyber fault, risk and threat assessment methodologies Resilient network concepts NAVAIR provided a more in-depth list of 36 specific areas, including full-spectrum cyber response and enablement capabilities for multiple weapon system kill chains, sacrificial infrastructure and reactive cyber “armor,” deceptive/misinformation software and hardware capabilities, threat attribution, identification and geolocation, software defined radio protections and capabilities networking, tools for weapon system cyber protection teams for incident response and inspection, and suppression and discovery of malware command and control mechanisms to include triggering, reconnaissance and logic bombs. The command will accept responses until Feb. 10, 2022, and review them quarterly. The next phase of the program will be by invitation. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2021/02/11/navwar-looking-for-emerging-cyber-research-and-development/