Researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette are working with a local company to develop a military boat capable of autonomous navigation.
Swiftships Shipbuilders LLC of Morgan City, La., designed the Anaconda, a 35-foot boat, for the U.S. Navy.
“By adding the capability of unmanned operation, we can increase ease of deployment and minimize threats to military personnel,” said Shehraze Shah, Swiftships’ chief executive officer.
The Anaconda is ideal for river operations. It is fast, quiet, agile and can be driven in shallow water. U.S. and Canadian special operations teams have used the boat, a special operations craft-riverine, for training exercises.
Swiftships enlisted the University’s help to enhance the Anaconda because of its expertise in control systems, sensors and robotics.
Dr. Arun Lakhotia, a professor of computer science, and Dr. Joshua Vaughan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, will apply technology that was used to create CajunBot, an autonomous all-terrain vehicle, in 2004.
CajunBot twice competed with some of the nation’s most prestigious universities in an elite Grand Challenge held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is the central research and development agency for the U.S. Department of Defense. The goal was to build a ground vehicle capable of unmanned navigation.
Now, Lakhotia, Vaughan and other researchers from UL Lafayette have begun a three-year program to modify the Anaconda.
“We’ll begin with some basic goals, such as getting the boat to operate autonomously in relatively calm water and to follow simple patterns, such as a straight line or simple turns. As the project continues, we’ll be developing more complex tasks,” Lakhotia explained.
Dr. Ramesh Kolluru, interim vice president for Research at UL Lafayette, said this public-private partnership will give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to engage in hands-on research and create opportunities in workforce and economic development.