The Navy is aggressively pursuing expansion of unmanned systems to make them “a trusted and sustainable part of the Naval force structure to provide lethal, survivable, and scalable effects in support of the future maritime mission.”
Achieving this vision of integrating large numbers of unmanned systems into the fleet requires a combination of cyber, electronic warfare, and information ops technologies and capabilities to achieve information superiority and effects over an adversary. Fundamentally, unmanned systems need to be secure and be able to communicate across all platforms. Booz Allen is at the forefront of conducting research and investing to enable interoperability and autonomy while ensuring network and platform security.
Interoperability: We are working to integrate across a broad array of sensors and platforms by applying our expertise in data pre-processing, edge processing, and analytics to fuse time-sensitive data.
Autonomy: We are applying our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications to address command & control, navigation, perception (sensor intelligence and sensor fusion), and obstacle detection and avoidance. Our cadre of industry-leading experts in robotics, autonomy, and swarms help identify current and future autonomous system capabilities, and establish scalable modeling and simulation environments for on-demand services.
Security: We are working to deliver resilient unmanned systems platforms and communications operating in contested environments. We are leading analysis of system vulnerabilities, attack vectors, red teams, prototyping, and cascading effects of compromised data integrity.
Our Command, Control, Computers, Communications, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Platform, Payloads, and Solutions team successfully demonstrated several of these capabilities during the Naval Integration in Contested Environments (NICE) Advanced Naval Technical Exercise (ANTX) 2021 at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. (You can view this technology in action here: Booz Allen ANTX 21 Demo.)
Our team deployed with our MANTAS T8 Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), embedded with our internal investment product (patent pending) “Sensor in a Box” (SiaB), which enables remote access, control, and management of electromagnetic radio frequency on a wide variety of platforms—both manned and unmanned. Key features include the Forward Edge Graphic Processing Unit enabling ML/AI to assist in “sorting the needle from the haystack”—radio frequency detection capable of producing tens of thousands of potential targets of interest that can be quickly tagged for future reference. These capabilities enable rapid locating and tracking, which support operational requirements and decision making. Collectively, these components enable accurate real-time dynamic planning, management, and execution of operations in the electromagnetic spectrum, allowing U.S. forces to effectively prosecute adversaries while simultaneously predicting and protecting our access to the invisible electromagnetic spectrum.
The team performed exceptionally well during the ANTX event, and we received tremendous feedback from the senior Navy and Marine Corps leaders who were in attendance. We are energized by the response we received and are looking forward to building on these capabilities to expand our role in supporting the Navy’s unmanned objectives.
