On April 7, Leidos announced a new capability from its sea systems team called Sea Dart, a high-performance, low-cost, flexible and adaptable uncrewed undersea vessel (UUV) designed to support the U.S. Navy and commercial customers across a broad range of missions.
“For more than two decades, Leidos has been at the forefront of supporting the U.S. Navy with cutting-edge autonomous subsurface and surface vessels,” said Dave Lewis, senior vice president of Sea Systems for the company. “Sea Dart is the next step in the progressive evolution of our UUV product line, introducing a new, low-cost commercial UUV to the market. It offers the flexibility to fully customize customer payloads while staying true to our core commitment to keeping production costs significantly lower than other models.”
Sea Dart currently comes in two different standard diameters, six and nine inches, and is transportable by one or two people. It is payload agnostic and compatible with the U.S. Navy’s preferred Underwater Vehicle software architecture as well as the U.S. Navy’s new non-propagating UUV battery design. Its high performance and low cost make it ideal for difficult missions in contested high-risk, environments and, at the other end of the spectrum, for use in scientific and research settings where low cost is paramount. A 12 ¾ inch diameter version is under consideration.
Depending on payload and configuration, Leidos’ Sea Dart UUV can assist in counter-mine operations, underwater survey, undersea infrastructure configuration monitoring, battlespace preparation, environmental sensing, and other missions that benefit from proliferation of low cost, high capability UUVs. Its ability to operate at tactically relevant speeds and depths for hours while providing significant amounts of payload power translate to rapid deployment and mission flexibility. It’s low cost, up to 80-90% less than other small UUVs with similar performance, make Sea Dart an ideal option when performance and budget efficiency matter.
With two variants that Leidos designers and engineers took from design concept to functional test in a year, Leidos’ Sea Dart family of UUVs demonstrates our ability to rapidly innovate and deliver flexible, adaptable and affordable maritime solutions. Sea Dart joins an already robust autonomous Sea Systems portfolio, including our new small unmanned surface vessel (USV)—Sea Archer—and our operationally proven medium USVs—Sea Hunter, Sea Hawk, Ranger and Mariner.
Source: Leidos
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