The Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) is set to embark on an ambitious trial of an Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV) in the Southern Ocean, scheduled to kick off in the vicinity of the Heard and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve in October 2023.
Over 90 days, the USV will cover an area of approximately 3.4 million square kilometres, proceeding West to East and venturing as far south as 62 degrees, bringing into the area covered by Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). Throughout the trial, the USV will conduct two primary missions in distinct environments. Near the Subantarctic islands, the USV will undertake shore approaches to observe wildlife and physical assets, while also validating and updating bathymetry information. The second mission set will take place far offshore, and will include fisheries biomass monitoring, surveillance of unidentified vessels, as well as the collection of meteorological and hydrographic data,
To support those mission sets, the USV will be outfitted with a variety of payloads, including cameras, radars, echo sounders, hydrophones, atmospheric monitoring instruments and passive acoustic systems. Getting that data back to the AAD in a secure and timely manner is a core priority of the trial, alongside command and control, seakeeping and data collection.
Seakeeping capabilities are particularly important to AAD as the division intends to eventually operate USVs further south, in areas with sea-ice concentrations, requiring a good degree of manoeuvrability and responsiveness. Another future use case, disclosed by the AAD, is the possibility of USVs physically receiving data from other uncrewed or autonomous assets, such as undersea gliders, uncrewed aerial systems and other USVs.
The trial will no doubt be of great interest to other government agencies, specifically the Australian Border Force (ABF) and Maritime Border Command (MBF). The remote Heard and McDonald Islands, located over 4,000 kilometres from Perth, have long been challenging to police and Australia has in the past struggled to maintain an effective presence there. If the AAD can successfully demonstrate the ability of a commercially available USV to operate in those conditions it could enable persistent surveillance activities to be undertaken, as the ABF has demonstrated off of the Ashmore and Cartier Islands.
If the trial is successful, the AAD intends to mount a second trial sometime between July 2024 and June 2025 with the same commercial provider. However, the organisation has left the door open to further trials with different capabilities, mission sets and vehicles beyond that.