HULS

Customer: U.S. Navy EODTECHDIV
Role: Subcontractor, Foster-Miller lead
Partners: Advanced Research Laboratory Penn State University; Seebyte
Duration: 10/2007 – 9/2008
Purpose: detect, identify and localize mines on ship hulls
Technologies: SURC, Sabertooth crawler, underwater unmanned vehicle
Capabilities: Search mission planning, mission management, underwater mine detection and localization, tele-operation, sonar analysis

The Navy’s EOD HULS program is specifically focused on searching and localizing potential threat objects on ship hulls, piers and pilings. Because the presence of such objects could prove devastating to U.S. assets, timely localization is essential.

Foster-Miller’s EOD HULS system consists of a Swimmer-Carrier Vehicle (SCV), a Crawler robot, and a portable operator control station (the OCU). The SCV is a semi-autonomous unmanned underwater vehicle (produced by partner ARL Penn State) that scans the search area (ship hull or pier) with side scan sonar, producing near-real-time sonar data stream viewable by operators on the OCU.

The Crawler robot is a small tracked unmanned vehicle that is attached magnetically to the ship hull. Once a threat object is identified using sonar, the Crawler is deployed on the ship hull near the object and is tele-operated to the object, sending back live video for inspection. The Crawler can be deployed either by hand from the ship deck, or by rapidly outfitting the SCV with a special nose that allows it to carry the Crawler to and deploy it on the ship hull at the waterline.

The Operator Control Unit is Foster-Miller’s Common Control Unit (CCU) running Applied Perception’s SURC (Soldier Universal Robot Controller). For HULS, SURC was extended with a three dimensional search planner, mission-specific robot operations workflow, and sonar analysis workflow including sonar analysis software from Seebyte.