The U.S. Navy, together with DARPA has started to develop Autonomous vehicles-robots. The concept is called NOMARS (No Ship Mariners Required). In the case of its successful implementation in the U.S. Navy may receive warship that will take on the most “dull, dangerous and dirty” work to get rid of it ships with living crews.
In the framework of the joint project is expected to be built within five years, 10 Autonomous unmanned surface vessels – Large Unmanned Surface Vehicle (LUSV) in length from 61 to 91 m with a displacement of 2000 tons. The court will act as scouts or floating missile platforms. Ideally, LUSV will be either fully Autonomous or with a small crew.
As reported in DARPA, while NOMARS is a separate project to create from scratch a fully Autonomous vehicle, LUSV will be created on the basis of already existing ships with quarters for the crews.
The main feature NOMARS – lack of the bridge, the conning tower, dwellings and other infrastructure necessary for life support of the crew, which will significantly reduce the size of the vessel.
Created on the basis of small vessels to service offshore oil platforms LUSV will retain their previous functions, however, they are unlikely to be useful in the future in the ranks of the Navy.
According to experts, the creation of NOMARS’s only a matter of time. If recently the main driver of the project was to create inexpensive unmanned military vehicle, now added to this factor of the epidemic, which killed hundreds of sailors. Ship drone no COVID-19 is not terrible.
Source — C4ISRNet