ASNE Delaware Valley Chapter Teaches Students Naval Engineering through the Sea Perch Underwater Robotics Program

Sea Perch is an underwater robotics program sponsored by the Office of Naval Research as part of the National Naval Responsibility for Naval Engineering aimed at recruiting the next generation of naval architects and marine engineers. ASNE Delaware Valley (DV) and Naval Surface Warfare Center, Philadelphia, embraced the outreach opportunity as an educational, challenging, and fun way to get kids excited about naval engineering. ASNE-DV has received an overwhelmingly positive feedback from both teachers and students. Teachers have said their students are excited to learn about remotely operated vehicles and cannot wait to work on their Sea Perch robots. During the past 3 years, ASNE-DV has teamed with Drexel University and the school district of Philadelphia to successfully implement a sustainable, local Sea Perch competition program for middle and high school students. ASNE-DV is encouraging expansion of the program to additional areas. This article discusses how the DV Sea Perch program evolved from two schools building the robots in the winter of 2005, to over 40 teams from a diverse range of schools participating in a Sea Perch competition in the spring of 2007.     

Importance of Addressing Human Systems Integration Issues Early in the Science and Technology Process

Historically, human systems integration (HSI) and other operational issues are not addressed during the science and technology (S&T) phase because the focus is on technology development. That view is to solve the "tough science" first, and the rest is simple application by a program office or operational forces. An imbalance between technology development efforts and total system performance considerations, e.g., total ownership cost, workload, manning, training, operational concept, skills, and human performance, leads to suboptimal solutions at best, and at worst prevents the technology's benefits from transitioning out of S&T at all. If HSI is not addressed during the S&T phase, the responsibility falls to the acquisition programs to ensure that operator, maintainer, and total system performance are optimized in the final design. By this point, cost and schedule constraints can make this prohibitive, limiting the options to either using a legacy system or accepting the technology with suboptimal performance and high life-cycle costs (because design problems lead to manpower, training, and human error problems). However, if the S&T community uses HSI in their technology readiness level evaluation criteria, the Department of Defense can reduce its out-year costs and recapitalize that funding to buy required weapons systems and platforms while still reaping the tactical benefits that a new technology offers.     

Intelligent Tools Used in the Design of Navy Ships

The first step in implementing an intelligent ship is designing the ship intelligently. Naval ship design is becoming an interactive process where designers on different sites can work collaboratively and simultaneously, connected through virtual design environments. In this paper we introduce two such design environments. The first is an immersive, virtual reality environment enabling rapid design of ship space arrangements, exploration of Human System Integration issues, and reduced cost of test and evaluation through the use of modeling and simulation. The second is a systems engineering application capable of evaluating the benefit of spiral technology insertions, identifying areas for research and development investment, and evaluating the performance, risk, and affordability of proposed technologies in current and future ship systems, by conducting trade space analysis and optimization. Applications of these tools will be discussed.