Staff use the maritime autonomy test tank to demonstrate and test prototype technology for unmanned undersea vehicles.

Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology

We develop and assess innovative technology to support the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense's undersea and counter-undersea missions. Our expertise lies in acoustic and non-acoustic sensors, undersea networks, autonomous systems, and advanced signal processing. We perform rigorous systems analyses, develop system architectures, and build prototypes to test the effectiveness of new concepts, capabilities, and processing techniques. Our staff help inform the development of new systems that combine undersea concepts with concepts from other technological domains including communications, sensing, and energy systems.

Featured Video

Video of robotic prototype that can map an undersea domain.

Recently, a research team at the Laboratory’s field site on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands prototyped and demonstrated a robotic system that can map the undersea domain. With some hardware and software enhancements to a system that maps unstructured above-ground environments, they enabled the robot to determine its position and orientation (pose) in the unstructured waters of the Pacific Ocean. This undersea environment provided perfect testing conditions for a system that can attain pose without relying on GPS. This effort expanded work on a collaborative robotics program that is researching ways to improve human-machine teaming for the Office of Naval Research. 

Featured Projects

A flow chart showing how audio signals are processed to create features for algorithms to distinguish between signals from cargo, passenger, tanker, and tug ships.
undersea technology
New machine learning methods capture statistical features within sonar data to distinguish between sound sources.
A diver and autonomous underwater vehicle swim underwater to identify an object (mine).
undersea technology
New navigation and vehicle autonomy algorithms consider which tasks humans and autonomous systems respectively do best, with the goal of improving search path planning and object classification in underwater environments.
a wire in wound up in a spool. The wire appears to be cooper and has red LEDs lit up throughout it.
microelectronics
A small, low-cost system that leverages long-length fibers embedded with electronics could provide persistent monitoring of the undersea environment.
an illlustration of Arctic sea ice, with yellow "links" showing connections from sensors in the ice up to a satellite.
Impact prediction
We are developing a sensor network to improve our understanding and monitoring of sea ice breakup in the rapidly changing Arctic region.
Autonomous High-Resolution Ocean Floor Mapping
undersea technology
The Laboratory is working to develop a novel seabed-mapping capability that can achieve high-resolution imaging and a fast coverage rate.

Advancing Our Research

Events

Jun
25 - 27
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts

Featured Publications

Modeling and validation of a mm-wave shaped dielectric lens antenna

Jul 29
2018 Int. Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society Symp., ACES, 29 July - 1 August 2018.

Multi-channel agile comb generator for antenna radiation pattern measurements

Jun 27
IEEE Int. Symp. Antennas and Propagation (APSURSI), 26 June - 1 July 2016.

Rain rate climatologies over marine regions

May 1
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