The Navy and global maritime industries, such as offshore oil exploration and production, have long had a need for unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).

However it is only recently,that UUV technology has been advanced sufficiently for a broad variety of applications. The need for UUVs is driven primarily by safety. The more UUVs are put into operation, the fewer humans will be required to work in dangerous underwater environments, wearing diving gear or in manned submarines.

For the past three decades U.S. Navy experts have relied on unmanned undersea vehicles, first as programmable targets to train anti-submarine warfare crews on surface ships, and later as remote sensing platforms.

Today the Navy is increasing its use of UUVs for counter-mine warfare, and is beginning to use autonomous undersea vehicles to map the ocean floors, locate submerged wrecks and obstacles, and occasionally to find and photograph underwater archeological sites.

"Typically, manned platforms such as small boats must be used to deploy small UUVs in hostile waters, according to an announcement by Sen. Murray. "Project funding will go towards developing the capabilities of larger UUVs to do this job instead."

SAIC experts will design a demonstration in which a host UUV carries, deploys, and recovers smaller UUVs, and collects intelligence sensor data from the small UUVs.