Swedish defense contractor Saab is throwing its hat into the market of maritime autonomy software, debuting its new \u201cAutonomous Ocean Core\u201d designed to offer navies the ability to command and control surface and subsurface platforms from afar \u2014 as far as the city of Paris sits from the islands off the coast of Sweden.<\/p>\n
\u201cAutonomous Ocean Core can boost key operational strengths for the dull, dirty, dangerous and dear. This control system gives our customers a tactical edge, increasing availability and efficiency and becoming less dependent on active manpower,\u201d said Mats Wicksell, senior vice president and head of Saab\u2019s business area Kockums.<\/p>\n
The Swedish company\u2019s pitch, as Saab\u2019s engineers describe it, is that AOC is capable of being integrated into any small or medium vessel \u2014 regardless of whether that boat was designed to be an unmanned platform \u2014 and turn it into it a remote-controlled craft that can be operated from ship or ashore.<\/p>\n
During the Euronaval exposition here in Paris, company officials showed potential customers, and an international group of reporters, a brief demonstration featuring a CB90 fast assault craft stationed in waters north of Sweden\u2019s coastline, in the ballpark of 1,800 kilometers away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe autonomy and the core technologies for this is something that fits very well for us when it comes to what we also have been working with over a number of years with lean manning to make sure that the armed forces can do more using less people,\u201d Lars Br\u00e4nnstr\u00f6m, a Saab executive overseeing Kockums shipyard, said. \u201cWe have this demonstrated in the highly advanced Visby stealth corvettes, our submarines and a number of different products.\u201d<\/p>\n
While officials were tight-lipped about specific sales, the Stockholm-based company\u2019s most natural customer, the Swedish Armed Forces, have already conducted trials with\u00a0Saab\u2019s Enforcer-3, a CB90 craft that was modified with autonomy software to experiment with how it could be used as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance asset. Peter Karlstr\u00f6m, the project manager for AOC at Saab, told Breaking Defense that while Enforcer-3\u2019s initial demonstrations with the Swedish military pre-dates AOC, that craft and others in Saab\u2019s inventory have since been updated with various baselines of the newer software.<\/p>\n
The trend of interest into unmanned and autonomous vessels has been a theme in recent years for both for the US Navy and its industrial base, as well as European militaries and their respective contractors. Just here in Paris this week,\u00a0Naval Group, the state-owned French shipbuilderunveiled its first unmanned surface vessel designed, much like Saab\u2019s Enforcer-3, to act as a detachable ISR asset alongside manned warships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Swedish defense contractor Saab is throwing its hat into the market of maritime autonomy software, debuting its new \u201cAutonomous Ocean Core\u201d designed to offer navies the ability to command and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,30],"tags":[59,58],"class_list":["post-338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-military-tech","category-naval","tag-saab","tag-unmanned-ships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/SAAB.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=338"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedefencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}