Austal USA's Solutions division, based in our Charlottesville, Va. office, is dedicated to Advanced Maritime Solutions and Autonomous Systems. This strategic initiative focuses on developing, integrating, and delivering cutting-edge autonomous platforms, artificial intelligence-enabled systems, and next-generation mission technologies.
The segment includes our Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) portfolio, coupled with future growth in Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) and advanced maritime technologies such as enterprise asset management and life-cycle support systems. These capabilities are designed to enhance operational effectiveness and increase the agility and scalability of both defense and industrial missions.
With dedicated investment in innovation, partnerships with emerging technology leaders, and a multidisciplinary team of engineers and domain experts, this segment positions the company to rapidly respond to the autonomous maritime and advanced defense technology needs of our customers. The Solutions business line will build on the momentum of our past performance with unmanned systems development programs.
The launch of this segment marks a pivotal step in Austal USA's long-term growth strategy, as we expand our portfolio within the advanced maritime solutions and autonomous systems business segment. These high-impact domains shape the future of national security and naval operations.
Autonomy
Austal USA’s autonomous ship designs reflect the company’s superior ability to generate forward thinking customized surface ship solutions affordable to the U.S. Navy. Austal USA’s flexible, optionally manned, and autonomous artificial intelligence-enabled surface vessel designs are driven by data analytics and incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Our designs variants range from single payload to high-capacity payloads. These platforms are tailored to meet emerging and evolving autonomous requirements to provide increased lethality, logistics and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability.
The vessels’ cyber protected open architecture network allows the ship class to meet the Navy’s requirement for modular payloads in support of distributed lethality. As America’s most modern major shipyard, Austal USA continues to adapt its designs and facilities to provide the most innovative, capable and affordable surface ship solutions to our customers.
Austal USA is designing autonomous ships from the keel up to be highly reliable – optimizing the trade space between reliability and redundancy — to provide the best solution for the unmanned and autonomous platforms of the future Fleet.
Building on already highly automated Hull, Mechanical & Electrical (HME) system platforms, Austal USA’s autonomous surface vessel designs include automated maintenance, health monitoring, and mission readiness to provide up to 30 days of operation without human intervention. The self-managed machinery control system (MCS), which allows the ship to be minimally manned by centralizing machinery operations to the bridge, performs automated duty cycling to balance run time between multiple machines, detects anomalies and auto-aligns ship systems for different missions, and re-aligns ship systems for periodic maintenance or fault recovery. MCS is secure, scalable, distributive and reconfigurable for multiple propulsion configurations.
Life Cycle Support
Another element of the solutions business segment, life-cycle support, is represented by Austal’s Lifecycle Upkeep Sustainment Intelligence (LUSI) product. The LUSI Ship On Board System (SOBS) is concerned with the maintenance and system health of the vessel over its entire life-cycle.
It has developed applications to assist with this objective. There is also detailed data management within SOBS that “packages” sensor and reliability data for analysis when the vessel comes alongside. This is digested by the Shore LUSI application for class wide analysis and data engineering.