General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS) has opened its Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Manufacturing and Assembly Center of Excellence facility in Taunton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Company officials and representatives from the U.S. Navy formally opened the facility, which will provide manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing capabilities for GDMS’ Knifefish and Bluefin Robotics UUVs.
Knifefish is a medium-class Mine Countermeasure (MCM) UUV that provides enhanced mine-hunting capability by detecting, classifying and identifying both buried mines and mines in high clutter environments.
The company’s family of Bluefin Robotics products consists of UUVs and related technologies that provide an array of underwater sensor capabilities for defense, commercial and scientific customers worldwide.
The UUV center of excellence will use a portion of Taunton’s 500,000+ square feet facility. In addition to the UUV center of excellence, the Taunton facility develops several communications capabilities for the U.S. Army as well as provides engineering, manufacturing and production support for many GDMS programs.
“We have expanded our maritime operations to include the Taunton UUV Manufacturing and Assembly Center of Excellence to produce our existing best in class small and medium UUVs and allow for additional expansion space for growth on future UUV programs of all sizes,” said vice president and general manager of General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Maritime and Strategic Systems business, Carlo Zaffanella.
“This location was specifically selected to provide additional capacity that will allow for larger scaling and optimization of UUV production with purpose-built manufacturing cells, fixtures, and special test equipment, while maintaining proximity to our Bluefin Robotics Engineering Team in Quincy.”
