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Robots designed to ease sailors’ workload

Take a good look at that sailor next to you, because he won’t be there in tomorrow’s Navy, according to scientists and industry exhibitors at the Office of Naval Research’s annual Science and Technology conference in Washington Tuesday.

Unmanned systems, already becoming common in aerial battlefields, will continue to edge into the maritime realm to ease the workload of sailors and, in some cases, take their place, researchers said on the first day of the three-day conference.

So the integration of humans and robots is a top priority for ONR researchers, said Rear Adm. William Landay, the chief of naval research, because planners expect that sailors and Marines will spend as much time dealing with automated systems as with flesh-and-blood service members.

“How does the robot become part of the team?” Landay asked. During a presentation, he included video of a “female” humanoid robot with an accentuated mouth and human-like eyes; the robot expressed anger, sadness and confusion before it told audience members it was happy to have met them.

In another display on the exhibit floor, ONR showed photos of a horse-sized, four-legged, walking robot called Big Dog that can carry the packs, or other gear, of a squad of Marines. Also, ONR’s “bio-mimetic robots” mimic the movement of undersea animals, such as sharks. Designers hope tomorrow’s shark-bots could be part of a long-endurance undersea observation system.

Apart from unmanned vehicles and stand-alone robots, ONR officials said technical innovations in automation could let the Navy of the future take more human beings out of the field, a notion that Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead has repeatedly mentioned as a top priority.

“What could we do with a maintenance-free ship?” asked Lawrence Schuette, ONR’s director of innovation. “Or a ship that requires so little maintenance you could put 30 or 40 people on it and have it serve for 30 years.”

Short of improvements on that scale, Schuette described naval programs that could drastically change the way tomorrow’s ships are designed. Ships with electromagnetic railguns need much smaller magazines because their shells require no propellant, he said, nor would a ship armed with ONR’s free-electron laser weapon. And ships with an all-electric propulsion system wouldn’t necessarily require the long drive-shafts that run from today’s engines to their propellers, if the ship instead used a new kind of Navy azimuth thruster, as found on cruise ships. That design could free a lot of interior space in a hull, Schuette said.

The sailors and Marines of today could still see some quality-of-life improvements from the high-tech projects that ONR discussed in its opening sessions Tuesday, including a new shipboard water-manufacturing system; a high-bandwidth laser communications network; and programs to lighten the load of people on foot, including powered exoskeleton armor.