HII’s Uncrewed Systems, a business unit of its Mission Technologies division, has completed trials with the REMUS 620, the company’s advanced medium-class unmanned underwater vehicle, or MUUV, in the U.S. Navy UUV Confidence Course in Bangor, Washington.
HII said Wednesday the MUUV was shipped from its Pocasset, Massachusetts facility to Keyport, Washington and went through pre-mission checks and ballasting.
An Industry First
The REMUS 620 is the first industry-made MUUV to go through the Navy’s confidence course, making HII one of the first companies to use the test course. This showcases the collaboration between the service branch’s Unmanned Undersea Vehicles Group ONE, or UUVGRU-1, and industry partners.
The confidence course is meant to offer repeatable and comparable performance data for capability development. This aligns with the Chief of Naval Operations’ NAVPLAN Project 33 and submarine force objectives, which are intended to bolster warfighting readiness.
“Getting a chance to put our newest design through its paces on the Navy’s UUV confidence course was a great opportunity for us to validate our design improvements to the vehicle. We also gained a lot of valuable operational data using the KRAKEN MINSAS 120, ” said Adrian Gonsalves, REMUS 620 product manager.
“The confidence course provided us a great benchmark we can use to continue our improvements to this great design and gave us a chance to show UUV sailors in Keyport how much improvement we built into this next-gen MUUV in terms of modularity and maintainability,” added Gonsalves.