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Sweden 



In Sweden, the rescue vehicle, URF, is 

 under development at Kockums for the Royal 

 Swedish Navy. This 50 ton vehicle is 

 capable of handling a crew of 3 plus 2 

 divers and a 4,400 lb. pay load to depths 

 of 1,500 feet. 



Kockums has designed a unique Submarine 

 Support Vessel (SSV) ^^^ to transport, 

 lavinch and retrieve a civilian version of 

 the URF. The SSV carries the vehicle in 

 an enclosed compartment forward of the 

 coning tower on the top of the pressure 

 hull. The SSV displaces 1,600 tons and 

 is 65 meters long and capable of operating 

 to 400 feet. The SSV enables submerged 

 launch and retrieval of the URF type 

 vehicle; thus achieving an independent, 

 all weather operating capability avoiding 

 the air sea interface problems. 



Kockums has also prepared designs for two 

 unique submarine type systems aimed at 

 the offshore industry for full autonomous 

 operation without a support ship. One is 

 a 170 ton submarine for inspection mis- 

 sions with an endurance capability of 

 10 days. The other is a 400 ton submarine, 

 36 meters long with diver lockout capa- 

 bility and mission endurance of 3 weeks 

 or more, and an operating depth capability 

 to 300 meters 



UNMANNED VEHICLE DEVELOPMENT 



United States 



The USA owns and operates over 60 percent of 

 the world's unmanned undersea vehicles; 

 the major developer of tmmanned vehicle 

 systems is the U.S. Naval Undersea Center, 

 San Diego, California. Their latest 

 development is the Remote Unmanned Work 

 System (RUWS) , Figure 8, capable of 

 operating at depths of 20,000 feet. 



HYDRO Tech Systems Incorporated, 

 Houston, Texas, is constructing two major 

 unique unmanned tethered systems. Work 

 Vehicle (WV) , Figure 9 , and Vertical 

 Transport Vehicle (VTV) , primarily for 

 use in remotely controlled pipeline repair 

 work to 4,000 feet with an intermediate 

 capability to operate at 1,800 feet. The 

 characteristics of the 50 ton WV and 60 

 ton VTV systems are given in Table 2. 



Hydro Products, San Diego, California, 

 produces a remote controlled vehicle, 

 RCV-125, for subsea inspection of well 

 heads, pipelines, cables and other struc- 

 tures. Ametek-Straza, El Cajon, California, 

 has developed two unmanned systems — 

 Submersible Craft Assisting Repair and 

 Burial (SCARAB) for AT&T, which can be 

 used for locating the cable by detecting 

 its magnetic properties, uncovering and 

 repairing the cable, and burying the cable. 

 Several new unmanned tethered vehicles 

 such as DEEP DRONE, RECON II, and the Cable 

 Oper-ated Recovery Device (CORD) have been 

 developed mainly for search and recovery. 



Soviet Union 



The Soviet Union has developed at least 

 seven unmanned systems as listed in Table 2, 

 One Soviet article ^-^^ claims that more 

 than 20 varieties of underwater, remotely 

 controlled vehicles are being used by 

 scientists. Most of these are operated 

 by remote control via a tether because of 

 the poor reliability of wireless control; 

 however, efforts are underway to provide 

 pre-programmed, automatic, robot control 

 without a tether. 



The Soviets have developed a system which 

 simulates the presence of a real operator 

 underwater. A moving control panel seat is 

 used to accurately duplicate the move- 

 ments of the robot. The seated operator 

 senses the movement of the robot via his 

 vestibular mechanism and can rapidly eval- 

 uate and intervene with the dynamic situa- 

 tion. Robot development with multi-sensor 

 perception and pre-programmed computer 

 technology is being pursued(3). 



Robot Vehicles 



Out of the 55 unmanned vehicles reported in 

 Table 2, only 5 are identified as untethered 

 robots. The U.S. has developed 4 robot 

 vehicles—UARS , SPURV, SEA DRONE I and the 

 MIT Robot; the Soviet Union is currently 

 developing one robot vehicle — GIDROPLAN. 

 An untethered robot vehicle has the advan- 

 tage of not requiring a long unwieldy 

 tether and a surface support vessel with 

 special station keeping characteristics. 

 However, it does require a more sophis- 

 ticated and costly multi-sensor instrumen- 

 tation and control system integrated into 

 a multi-channel signal processing and 



