Challenge Statement

The Department of National Defence (DND) requires the capability to monitor off-shore waters with emphasis on the detection of underwater threats by way of rapidly deployed, persistent, autonomous, yet affordable solutions.

Background and Context

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) require enhanced capabilities to perform surveillance of the maritime approaches to Canada. Recent advances in autonomy, robotics, energy and intelligent signal processing suggest that new concepts could be developed to provide better and less expensive surveillance solutions than those that are currently available.

The emphasis of this call for proposals is for surveillance of underwater threats which are defined as submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV). However, the ability to detect both underwater threats and above water objects may provide additional information to improve interpretation of underwater sensor signals and reduce false alarm rates.

The areas of employment include maritime regions from shore to the continental shelf break or the Exclusive Economic Zone of Canada, whichever is furthest. The technology should be able to provide surveillance in waters up to 200 meters in depth as well as in a relatively shallow harbour environment.

The technology has to be highly autonomous. However, it must also be able to interact with a human operator/analyst in real time.

Outcomes and Considerations

The desired outcome is a rapidly deployable, persistent, autonomous, yet affordable technology to provide surveillance of off-shore waters with emphasis on detecting underwater threats. The technology should be deployable as multiple units to extend coverage. Highly autonomous on-board signal analysis should be demonstrated to provide good probability of detection with low false alarm rate. Sensors are expected to be predominately passive for covertness and for energy efficiency although an active sensor capability is acceptable. High speed, high capacity communications with the platform are required to transmit detection incident reports, sensor data for remote human analysis, status reports and to receive re-tasking commands.

“Persistence” is defined as multiple month’s on-station. The technology should be deployable from military ships without the need for engineering changes to the vessel. Deployment from shore would also be useful.

Proposals should address privacy and ethical concerns.