“Although the SAND USV was born as a Search and Rescue [SAR] vehicle, over the past year Fincantieri NexTech has been working on adding new payloads in order to increase the platform’s flexibility and, consequently, mission set,” Fabrizio Orsini, International Sales Area Manager at Fincantieri NexTech, told Naval News.
Today, the SAND is a remotely controlled Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) with an autonomy of 48h at 12kn and 72h at 8kt. This means that while it is capable of navigating autonomously using the Collision Regulation (COLREG) requirements as re-planning guidelines – there is always a remote operator in the loop overseeing all its maneuvers and making the final calls where necessary. Autonomous navigation is currently based on data fusion coming from the SAND’s onboard AIS and radar systems , to be increased in the future with additional sensing capabilities in different domains.
“The next evolutions of the system will see the integration of additional sensors in order to complete the SAND’s situational awareness picture as well as increased endurance to comply with mission requirement” Orsini said.
Fabrizio Orsini, International Sales Area Manager at Fincantieri NexTech
This will include the integration into the system of the video feed from the onboard 360° camera and performance test and evaluation of other sensors like.
“To this end we are leveraging the successful studies we carried out last year with another programme called MARIN,” Orsini added.
The integration of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) images into the SAND’s situational awareness picture might be a significant advantage for autonomous navigation, being able to provide a short range obstacle map surrounding the USV. The use of the technology is well proven in the automotive industry and its costs are decreasing, however in the naval domain its application for navigation is still heavily affected by the quality of the water in which the light is meant to travel. “We will continue testing the technology and will integrate it incrementally,” Orsini noted.
Over the last year, Fincantieri NexTech has also added its Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) Launch And Recovery System (LARS) to the SAND. The LARS, which tested in May near La Spezia, has been designed to release two UUVs in a given area of interest. The launch and recovery of the systems is done autonomously, but the SAND USV has been fitted with Electro-Optical cameras that will continuously monitor the LARS in order to allow human interventions if necessary.
The SAND will be able to track and update the UUVs’ location via an underwater acoustic USBL/modem system. Data will be recovered from the UUVs through the modem, when undersea, and relayed via radio modem to a mothership or ground station via Line Of Sight (LOS) – currently successfully tested at ranges up to 8 nm – and, in the future, via SATCOMs – as SAND has been designed to accommodate a SATCOM system. “The switch between one mode of communication and another will be done automatically,” Mirko Stifani, Product Leader Unmanned Systems at Fincantieri NexTech specified.
Fincantieri NexTech will be testing its new SAND USV fitted with the LARS and two UUVs at the upcoming REPMUS 2023 exercise. “The aim is to be able to use the system for a range of missions such as Naval mine Warfare and ASW, but also underwater archaeology and acoustic monitoring,” Stifani added.
The rest of the roadmap is in the making, but Fincantieri NexTech is also looking into developing the CATL (Collaborative Autonomous Tasking Layer) interoperability protocol developed by NATO community leaded by the CMRE and already tested during REPMUS. 2021 and 2022 with the ambition to test different interoperability levels also for 2023.
