The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), along with senior U.S. Navy officials, christened the agency’s new anti-submarine warfare continuous trail unmanned vessel (ACTUV) program on Monday.
The ceremony took place in Portland, Oregon, and marked the transition from a DARPA-led design and construction project to a new stage of open-water testing to be conducted jointly with the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Among those in attendance for the christening were Scott Littlefield, DARPA program manager; Roger Krone, chairman and chief executive officer at Leidos; Rear Admiral Robert Girrier, director of Unmanned Warfare Systems; Rear Admiral Mathias Winter, chief of Naval Research, Innovation Technology Requirements, and Test and Evaluation; DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar; and the Honorable Robert Work, deputy secretary of defense.
DARPA signed a memorandum of agreement with the ONR to jointly fund an extended test phase of an ACTUV prototype in Sept. 2014. DARPA will collaborate with the ONR to fully test the capabilities of the vessel and several innovative payloads during open-water testing schedule to begin this summer off of the California coast. Pending the results of those tests, the program could transition to the U.S. Navy by 2018.