Meet DARPA’s Sea Hunter: an autonomous unmanned ship in prototype stage that could one day lead to vessels capable of traversing thousands of kilometers over open seas without a single crew member aboard. The vessel has already passed challenging tests over the past few months.
As the Office of Naval Research explains, it plans to conduct:
additional at-sea tests to further develop ACTUV/MDUSV technologies, including automating payload and sensor data processing, rapidly developing new mission-specific autonomous behaviors, and exploring autonomous coordination among multiple USVs.
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