Small Company Races For Place On Navy’s New Ship Program

By RICHARD C. BARNARD, Editor in Chief

The effort to develop and build the Navy’s novel Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is a classic clash of industrial titans. To foster competition and restrain costs, the service’s ship procurement chiefs have pitted teams of contractors headed by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics in a contest for possibly $12 billion in orders and a major foothold in the world market for advanced shallow-water warships.

Out of the limelight, however, a lesser-known contest is shaping up that over the long term could prove vital to the Navy. Small companies are racing to win a spot on the LCS, bringing with them innovations in technologies such as power systems, communications and intuitive software. Angle Inc., of Washington, D.C., is providing digital animations and degaussing systems to the Lockheed Martin team, for example, and Gryphon Technologies of Riverdale, Md., is providing engineering services. Some small companies see a place for themselves aboard the modular, interchangeable “mission packages” of systems and software that will enable the LCS to perform a variety of missions such as mine warfare, antisubmarine warfare or defense against surface threats.

Mission packages for the initial four ships to be built are taking shape.

Capt. Walt Wright, program manager for LCS mission modules, said the service expects underwater vehicle developers, “many of which are small businesses, to actively participate in the development and fielding” of future programs.

The Navy is relying on small firms for new ideas that will be critical to the success of the LCS. The ship is envisioned as a trendsetter. Its crew of 50 will be expected to operate a multimission vessel able to take the fight to the littoral, or coastal areas, and improve the Navy’s prowess at finding quiet diesel submarines amid ambient noise in the shallows.

Making that vision a reality will require a multitalented crew and an array of robot-like devices that can do tasks now done by people. For example, an initial version of the LCS will be equipped with the Battlespace Preparation Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (BPAUV), a small robot shaped like a torpedo that maps the ocean floor, hunts for mines and reports changes in ocean conditions near the shore.

The BPAUV is completely autonomous and can be programmed quickly for a variety of missions. It provides technologies the Navy does not have, and is designed and built by Bluefin Robotics Corp., of Cambridge, Mass.

Bluefin is a company with 60 employees that did not exist until seven years ago but today has a sole source contract to equip an initial version of the LCS with its BPAUV. The relationship between the Navy, Bluefin and its multifaceted robot provides a look at how a tiny company can land a spot on a huge defense program like LCS. Many are related to research labs and leverage the service’s efforts to foster innovation and alert small companies to the Navy’s needs.

The inspiration for the BPAUV came in 1999, during an Office of Naval Research (ONR) workshop in Corpus Christi, Texas. ONR was looking for ways to improve the Navy’s prowess at mine warfare, and one of the attendees was James Bellingham, a founder of Bluefin. He met with the Navy’s explosive ordnance disposal experts and got a briefing on mine warfare aboard one of the Navy’s mine-clearing vessels.

“It became clear that a very high leverage activity was obtaining maps of entire coastal areas many months before” a military operation, Bellingham told Seapower. Some ocean conditions foster the location and identification of mines. He discussed the need for automated mapping with ONR managers at the conference.

Bellingham and his fledgling company were known to ONR because of their links to the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the early 1990s, all were involved with the lab’s family of Odyssey underwater vehicles developed for oceanography research. ONR funded several Odyssey research efforts. In 1997, Bellingham and other scientists at the lab founded Bluefin and still maintain close ties to MIT.

At the workshop, ONR managers encouraged Bellingham to respond to a Broad Agency Announcement seeking initial responses to Navy requirements related to a large number of mine warfare tasks, including battlespace preparation.

Douglas Todoroff, director of ONR’s Sensing and Systems Division, said, “we got 40 or 50 responses” to the announcement. He selected a few to receive small amounts of seed money for further development, a typical ONR practice.

“You get a lot of innovation from smaller companies,” he said. “They’re trying to get into new markets. Bluefin is a small company but very responsive to naval needs.”

In the years that followed, the Navy continued refining its requirements for battlespace preparation, ONR kept investing in Bluefin’s innovations and the company improved its BPAUV. Bluefin developed unique battery modules that can be swapped out without opening a pressurized vessel. Its sonar heads, originally exposed to water, were protected with plastic. For the robot’s outer skin, Bluefin chose an engineering plastic that is easy to modify.

Most importantly, the company kept improving its intuitive mission planning software that today enables sailors to program a mission with three mouse clicks. Other systems require the manual input of waypoints and other data. Chris Wallsmith, Bluefin’s software manager, said, “we have a software base that we can use across a lot of different platforms, and our operator tools are simple to use.”

ONR formed an integrated product team of government and industry experts to critique the BPAUV and suggest further improvements, and the Navy tested the robot off the coast of Norway, during a Rim of the Pacific exercise and in the Gulf of Mexico.

Meanwhile, Bluefin and MIT developed other products, including the Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. Fitted with a camera, a pitch-controlled dual-frequency imaging sonar and eight thrusters, the vehicle is about 3 feet long and designed to inspect ships hulls, berths and ports. Bluefin designed the vehicle with the government’s new homeland security missions in mind. There are also two vehicles similar to the BPAUV, though smaller in size. But the company’s prime focus remains the BPAUV and its application to the LCS program.

Wright said that in addition to battlespace preparation, Bluefin will provide “the opportunity to continue experimentation begun by ONR into the different potential uses of unmanned underwater vehicles for many naval missions” and aid in “the development of launch and recovery and communications systems suitable to underwater vehicles.”

Bluefin has a mere toehold in the LCS program: a contract to place a BPAUV system on one ship, with an option for a second. Nonetheless, LCS is a premier Navy program, and the company’s success thus far has enlarged its image in the naval marketplace.

“There are so many people that want to talk to us, that we have a hard time getting to all of them,” said Greg Moeller, Bluefin’s business development manager.

Bluefin’s future looms large. Its spot on the first LCS could open the way for contracts on future ships of the class, which could total as many as 56 vessels. However, “Bluefin does not have a guaranteed place on [later LCS] mission modules,” said Wright. “The firm must compete like everyone else.”

Added Moeller, “We have a great partnership with the Navy, and we’re going to continue to improve on a very good and reliable system and put it in the field.”

Whether Bluefin can continue its brief but steep climb from relative obscurity is one of the questions to be answered as the LCS and its mission modules are developed and deployed.