The Navy Team Up With General Motors On Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Mission
The field of autonomous, fuel-celled motor vehicles has been a hot topic for quite some time now. With many of the big car manufacturers including GM Motors, Toyota, and Nissan jumping on board it will not be long before an autonomous vehicle is just as widely used as traditional motors.
The field of autonomous, fuel-celled motor vehicles has been a hot topic for quite some time now. With many of the big car manufacturers including GM Motors, Toyota, and Nissan jumping on board it will not be long before an autonomous vehicle is just as widely used as traditional motors. We also see autonomous unmanned missions in planes, with several world records in place already. But, what about using this technology in the sea?
General Motors have just signed a contract with the Office of Naval Research and the U.S Naval Research Laboratory to bring this technology more closely to the sea and are looking to develop a fleet of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUV’s) to be used by the Navy. The aim of this partnership is to use the technology that is already available to design more fuel efficient options for Naval facilities.
Using GM’s long-standing research around this topic, the Navy will be seeking to produce UUV’s that can withstand the rough waters of the sea and have high enough endurance levels for it to be able to operate for weeks if not months at a time. So far, according to Karen Swider-Lyons, head of the Navy Research Laboratory’s (NRL) Chemistry Division of its Alternative Energy Section, they are yet to find a suitable application that it wanted to apply to their underwater drones.
However, the Navy are certain that they want to use fuel cells rather than batteries for their development as they are reliable and can be refilled quickly, unlike batteries that can take hours to recharge and are lightweight in comparison also. Although one solution has not yet been found for the Navy, the search will continue through GM’s fuel cell research to develop an end product that will be energy efficient. And with the Department of Defence allowing $600 million in its budget for the development of these UUV’s, you can be sure this is not the last we will be hearing of them.
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Owen Castellanos
Owen Castellanos is the Hardware & Gaming Reporter at TrendinTech, where he tests graphics cards, processors, consoles and peripherals and follows the games industry, from the major publishers to independent studios. He previously wrote reviews and benchmarks for Tom's Hardware and contributed features to PC Gamer, covering everything from laptop testing to the economics of game development. Owen holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and attends CES in Las Vegas, Computex in Taipei and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco each year to meet chipmakers and developers. He writes for readers who want to know whether a product is worth the money, and he is not shy about saying when it is not.
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