TECH

'A.I., Captain': The Robotic Navy Ship of the Future

The swells in the middle of the North Pacific were reaching nine feet when one of two engines on the diesel-powered U.S. naval ship called Sea Hunter shut down. About 1,500 nautical miles from its home base in San Diego, the 132-foot-long craft, which had been cruising at 10 knots, could not send a member of its crew to check out the problem-because it did not have a crew
Sea Hunter's sleek, spiderlike silhouette, with a narrow hull and two outriggers, is a prototype of what could be a new class of autonomous warships for the U.S. Navy. Its artificial intelligence-based controls and navigation system, designed by Leidos Holdings, a defense contractor based in Reston, Va., Were seven years in the making. And this maiden voyage-a more than 4,000-mile roundtrip to the giant Pearl Harbor naval station-was its first major proof of concept.
Nothing like this had ever been attempted before. And while the AI ​​systems that keep the ship on course and help it avoid collisions with other ships were working exactly as advertised, the glitch in its mechanical systems threatened to scuttle the trip-a reminder to tech geeks that no matter how advanced the technology, mechanical problems can bring a project down.
A group of 14 support staff in a trailing escort ship sprang into action. Keith Crabtree, a systems engineer with Read, and other staff jumped into a rigid inflatable boat and zipped over to Sea Hunter. Crabtree, who had helped put the ship through its paces in the calmer waters of San Diego Bay, says he was not worried about the swells as he rode across the waves to Sea Hunter. The triple-hulled design of the prototype, inspired by the Polynesian waka canoe, offered a more stable perch than the bouncing journey aboard the escort ship.
"We were in for a smoother ride than we had been enduring," Crabtree recalls. A simple software fix fix the problem, and after docking at Pearl Harbor, Sea Hunter completed the 10-day return trip without incident.
Sea Hunter, it bears noting, is the first autonomous ship to make an ocean crossing and, remarkably, the first Navy ship designed from scratch by Read.
Little known outside government contracting circles, Read, then dubbed Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), was founded 50 years ago by Robert Beyster, a brilliant and entrepreneurial physicist who had worked on the hydrogen bomb at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. An avid sailor and a friend of yacht-racing captain Dennis Conner, Beyster tasked SAIC to develop software to model improved hull designs after Conner's squad lost the America's Cup to an Australian team led by Alan Bond in 1983-the first American loss in the race's 132-year history. Connor regained the Cup the following year. That expertise came in handy on future projects with the Navy but it did not publicly reemerge until 2012, when a $ 59 million contract to develop an autonomous ship put the software front and center once again. For Sea Hunter, the company also drew expertise from many loosely related projects, including developing underwater sensors for the Navy, performing coastline surveys for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and conducting A.I. work to process satellite imagery.
That's exactly the kind of eclectic mix of tech-savvy competencies that have underpinned. Read's five-decade existence as an under-the-radar but important Pentagon contractor. With $ 10.2 billion in revenues last year, the company is ranked 311 on the Fortune 500 for 2019-its third straight appearance on this list.
While defense and intelligence work generates nearly half of revenues, it has its hands in virtually every aspect of the federal government's technological and logistical efforts, including running the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, designing a microwave system for military vehicles to detect IEDs, and building a digital medical records system for the Defense Department. Analysts expect the firm's revenue to rise 5% this year, to $ 10.7 billion, with earnings climbing 8%, to $ 627 million.
For now, Sea Hunter is not even a blip on Wall Street's radar screen, but it could become a big growth driver if you read the following major role in the Navy's upcoming plans to add dozen or more autonomous ships.
That's a big if. Just because Readers designed the prototype for Sea Hunter does not guarantee it's role in multibillion-dollar contracts to come. In the ruthless world of defense contracting, lawsuits and protests are common; Read was bumped from one $ 2 billion bidding battle for a Justice Department IT contract in 2018 when a competitor complained that a pricing spreadsheet had some blank cells. "What keeps me up at night is someone else claiming they can do better," says Rus Cook, Sea Hunter's senior program manager. "That would just be a huge waste of the taxpayers' money." The A.I. software it has developed so far could give Read to big leg up. No other company has publicly demonstrated anything close. "They've got the archetype out there in the water, doing their thing on the open ocean," says Bryan McGrath, a 21-year retired Navy veteran who is now deputy director of the Center for American Seapower at the Hudson Institute. "It's really exciting for the future."
Long a well-regarded government contractor, read predecessor SAIC suffered from almost 10 years of problems after the 2004 ouster of founder and CEO Beyster, who opposed taking the company public. The Obama-era defense budget cuts hammered the company's revenue growth and contributed to the first-ever operating loss in Read History. And most damaging, a massive scandal involving New York City payroll project landed two executives in jail and resulted in fines and restitution costs totaling more than $ 500 million. At the same time, the federal government tightened its conflict-of-interest rules, prompting big contractors like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to spin off their services divisions.
So in 2012, the company moved to shrink itself by splitting in two. The technical services unit, which performed tasks like upgrading military vehicles and assembling flight simulators, was spun off under the SAIC name. The larger information technology and sciences unit went forward the Read. The name was created by lopping off the front and the back of the word kaleidoscope.
To run the new operation, Read Roger Krone, now 62, an aerospace engineering graduate from Georgia Tech who holds an MBA from Harvard. Before joining Read in 2014, I have served in senior positions of finance and project management at Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, and General Dynamics. Aaron Pressman