During Defense Department Lab Day at the Pentagon, the Army, Marine Corps and Navy all touted autonomous solutions for either finding or killing mines that might put service members in danger.
The Army and the Marine Corps combined existing tools — the Army's old-school M58 mine-clearing line charge and the Marines' modern expeditionary modular autonomous vehicle — to create an autonomous, remotely controlled device that will shoot 350 feet of roped C4 plastic explosive out over a minefield to clear a path for follow-on service members.
The technology mashup is only a proof of concept and it's expected to be tested this summer, likely at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California.
Navy Mine-Killer Deployment
The Navy likes to kill mines in the ocean. They've already got a tool to help them locate mines: the MK-18 MOD2 unmanned underwater vehicle. The MK-18 prowls the sea to identify the location of mines and then signals their location to those who will later destroy them.
The only problem with the MK-18 is that it requires sailors in rigid inflatable boats to manually deploy it — and that puts sailors in danger. The newly-developed "Airborne Surface Quad Thruster Underwater Interface Device," or ASQUID, grips on to the MK-18 and is lowered via tether from a hovering MH-60S Seahawk helicopter. The ASQUID can both deploy the MK-18, and recover it, without having to put sailors on the water. Suspended from a helicopter, ASQUID can deploy the mine-hunting MK-18, even when the seas would be too rough to deploy it via boat.