Keeping US Navy personnel safe

Autonomous systems are seen as one of the future technologies have huge significance in the world’s future, yet autonomy in maritime surface vehicles had been lagging behind that in ground or air domains. Ian Campbell had been working at Dstl on marine autonomy since the 1990’s and he, and his team at Dstl, set out to solve the problem.

The team would link up the stakeholders/potential user community, with the technologists and get them working collaboratively together to exploit the technology.

First, Ian needed to engage with SMEs to understand what barriers or challenges there may be within this undertaking.

These initially included whether to create a platform on which to incorporate a functioning algorithm for the technology or to develop a baseline autonomous system that would act as a testbed for wider UK PLC.

The team began working with ASV in 2006, an SME at the time, [FS2] to build an unmanned surface vehicle system that was able to drive itself from point to point. Ian had worked with ASV previously on target and weapons systems. This collaboration resulted in a baseline capability of intelligent standalone autonomous systems, which were able to sense surroundings to avoid collisions.

ASV consequently became a multinational company, and were bought by L3Harris, a global aerospace and defence technology innovator in 2018.

The original purpose of the technology was to gain informed analysis about targets and to be able to test weapons properly under safe and controlled conditions.

Ploughshare saw these autonomous systems and the work that Ian’s team were doing with ASV as something which could have commercial potential and be exploited. The team owned the Intellectual Property and were eventually able to license the technology with Ploughshare, yet because this wasn’t a government specific need area, it made sense for DSTL to own the IP.

ASV could see the benefit of the core software which Ian’s team had developed – the ability for a system to drive a boat around by itself in a safe manner, and licensed it.

From the outset Ian was focusing on how to deliver technology, rather than how that could be exploited in years down the line. “We’ve had to flex and adjust as we move forward. We weren’t as aligned to Ploughshare’s view for the technology at the beginning than we could’ve been.”

“On reflection, thinking beyond the technology and holistic requirements rather than just the tech requirements would have helped overcome certain challenges,” Ian says, “looking back to the start at the contract the team made with ASV for the project, the team weren’t looking at exploitation and IP management, so working with Ploughshare helped significantly because Ploughshare asked all the right questions to get the ball rolling”.

In the early 1990s Ian Campbell [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-campbell-753571/]  joined DSTL as an analyst in the above water domain in computer simulation modelling, going on to work in the amphibious domain and then after that, the special forces, doing a tour in Bahrain doing operational analysis for the Navy.

Whilst working in air domain, he began working on maritime autonomy, and in 2006, started in surface warfare at DSTL, the role is remains in today.