Atlas Elektronik UK, a joint company of ThyssenKrupp and Airbus DS, will present its unmanned mine hunting mission system, ARCIMS, at the Royal Navy’s Unmanned Warrior demonstration scheduled for October 2016.
The Unmanned Warrior serves as a platform for UK companies to showcase their maritime autonomous systems in a tactically relevant domain to the Royal Navy.
“It’s the perfect environment for us to demonstrate our naval mine countermeasures capabilities”, says Head of Surface Ships division at AEUK, James Young . “ARCIMS has proven USV capabilities, with two contracts received from international navies in 2015. Due to this increase in demand, we are ramping up our production capacity, and are currently fitting out the sixth ARCIMS at our dedicated integration facilities at Winfrith in Dorset.”
The company previously delivered its mine countermeasure systems to Royal Navy’s Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessel (MCMV). An ARCIMS USV was supplied to WTD71 in Germany to evaluate unmanned systems technologies for MCM. RNMB Hazard is used by the Royal Navy Maritime Autonomous Systems Trials Team (MASTT) while two portable minesweeping mission systems were supplied to a Middle East Navy.
Currently, ARCIMS is being integrated with the Northrop Grumman Corporation AQS-24B Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS). According to Atlas, this is the only operationally proven, high speed towed mine hunting system in the world that can be deployed from airborne and surface platforms.
The company said that integration testing of the 11-meter ARCIMS and AQS-24B, including remote launch and recovery of the towed sonar, will take place at the AEUK Bincleaves waterside facilities at Portland Harbour during September 2016.
ARCIMS is reconfigurable with modular payloads for MCM, hydrography, coastal ASW, maritime security and force protection. The ARCIMS unmanned surface vessel can operate remotely, autonomously or as a manned vessel.