The Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) Mine Hunting Capability (MHC) Team has awarded ATLAS ELEKTRONIK UK a contract to deliver an additional ARCIMS uncrewed minehunting system for the U.K. Royal Navy.
The Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV)-based system, known as RNMB HYDRA, will complement the 4 existing ARCIMS systems (RNMBs HUSSAR, HALCYON, HARRIER and HAZARD) being supplied to the Navy for mine sweeping and minehunting tasks.
RNMB HYDRA will be fitted with advanced sense and avoid autonomy, a launch and recovery system, and towed sidescan sonar. Command and control will be from a Portable Command Center and combines UXV autonomy software with Seebyte’s planning and analysis software.
“I am delighted in the Royal Navy’s decision to make further investments into the capability offered by ARCIMS, which have been delivered and supported under the U.K. Sweep and Wilton projects,” said Wes Galliver, Head of Surface Ship Systems Division. “The flexibility of the platform to deliver across the mine countermeasures domain once again allows us to showcase the deployment of both our own payloads and those of third parties.”
The platform will be delivered to the Royal Navy by late 2022 and deployed for Operational Evaluation in early 2023.
