Video Above: How the US Navy Can Fast-Track Building 500 Warships
By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven
The Navy is progressively phasing AI into its ship systems, weapons, networks and command and control infrastructure as computer automation becomes more reliable and advanced algorithms can increasingly make previously impossible discernments and analyses.
Previously segmented data streams on ships, drones, aircraft and even submarines are now increasingly able to share organized data in real time, in large measure to ongoing breakthrough advances in AI and Machine Learning.
Breakthrough Advances in AI and Machine Learning
AI can, for instance, enable command and control systems to identify moments of relevance from among hours or days or surveillance data in milliseconds, something which saves time, maximizes efficiency and performs time-consuming procedural tasks autonomously at exponentially faster speed.
“Multiple data bytes of information will be passed around on the networks here in the near future. So as we think about big data, and how do we handle all that data and turn it into information without getting overloaded, this will be a key part of AI, then we’re talking about handling decentralized systems,”Dr. Nathan Husted, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock, told an audience at the 2022 Sea Air Space Symposium…”and of course, AI plays a big part in the management in between the messaging and operation and organization of these decentralized systems.”
The success of AI could be described or thought of in almost a paradoxical way, in one sense its utility or value is only as effective as the size and quality of its ever-expanding database, yet its conclusions, findings or “answers” are by contrast very small and precise.
Perhaps only two seconds of drone video identify the sought after enemy target, yet surveillance cameras have hours if not days of data. AI can reduce the procedural burden placed upon humans and massively expedite the decision making process.
“If we look at the battlespace, we are actually training for the future. As we look at AI in the battlespace, … we’ve got big data and AI systems. So we’re going to have this extremely complicated information rich combat environment,” Husted said…
Navy industry partners also see AI as an evolving technology which will progressively integrate into more ship systems, command and control and weapons over time as processing speeds increase and new algorithms increase reliability by growing in an ability to assimilate new or otherwise unrecognized incoming data.
This building block approach, for example, is taken up by Northrop Grumman in its development of a new ship-integrated energy management, distribution and storage technology called Integrated Power and Energy Systems (IPES).
For instance, Northrop Grumman’s solution is built to accommodate new computing applications as they become available, such as AI-generated power optimization and electric plant controls.
The technology seeks to organize and store energy sources to optimize distribution across a sphere of otherwise separated ship assets such as lasers, sensors, command and control, radar or weapons.
AI-enabled computing can help organize incoming metrics and sensor data from disparate ship systems to optimize storage and streamline distribution as needed from a single source depending upon need.
“AI is an emerging capability that shows promise in some of these more complex electrical architectures to manage in near real time.
Future capability that would rely upon AI and be more computationally intensive is likely to happen in some aspects of electric plant controls,” Matthew Superczynski, Chief Engineer for Northrop Grumman’s Power/Control Systems, told Warrior in an interview. “We are building upon the architecture the Navy already has to give them more capability and lower risk. We can build on top of that
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