From data collection to contested logistics, the U.S. Navy plans to significantly increase uncrewed vessel use in the next few decades. MITRE created a prototype to enable industry partners to deliver standards-compliant solutions—and save time and development costs.
Above: MITRE's Matt Cuomo and Michelle Sit with an uncrewed surface vehicle, at the Navy's Silent Swarm exercise in July.
Imagine standing on a beach and catching sight of an object moving purposely through the water on its own, no human in sight. Is it a miniature submarine? A surfboard? Some kind of drone?
It could be a small uncrewed surface vessel, or USV. Operated remotely, they’re portable, light, and expendable—and they add significant capacity in the defense space. Think: supporting special warfare operations, conducting antisubmarine warfare, intelligence collection, and more.
Given the potential, it’s not surprising the Navy aims to have up to 40% of its fleet uncrewed by 2050. To reach that goal, they implemented the Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture, a.k.a. UMAA, which has become both a solution and a challenge.
The architecture standardizes the onboard autonomy interfaces across the growing portfolio of uncrewed naval vehicles to ensure new systems can integrate seamlessly. But doing so will require commercial vendors to develop UMAA-compliant platforms—which could mean substantial additional costs for the government in the coming years.
MITRE set out to find a way to defray that budget hit, under our independent R&D program. Our researchers combined commercial hardware with a popular open-source software package, creating a prototype that enables industry to develop low-cost, UMAA-compliant autonomous platforms.
"Our UMAA-compliance solution will allow the Navy to take full advantage of commercial-off-the-shelf platforms," says MITRE's Matt Cuomo, an autonomous systems engineer and the research project lead. "It will lower the price of autonomy for the government and 'break open the black box,'" he explains—referring to the typical vendor lock around autonomy solutions.
Our UMAA-compliance solution will…lower the price of autonomy for the government and 'break open the black box.'
Cuomo and his team built UMAA capabilities to support an array of open-source platforms. In 2024, they collaborated with a commercial vendor to evaluate the software stack on different systems, participating in the Navy’s Silent Swarm exercise in Alpena, Michigan, in July.
During the two-week event, our engineers demonstrated command and control of a commercial platform using MITRE’s UMAA solution. Michelle Sit, lead engineer for the project, says, "The exercise was a critical opportunity to understand how our technology could be deployed in real-world conditions and operational environments—and how to tailor our system for future operations."
The prototype can plug into and work with existing commercial platforms used for things like climate monitoring and seafloor mapping, while still protecting proprietary information.
That's critical because as a not-for-profit, trusted adviser to the government, MITRE develops technology with the goal of transferring those solutions to the commercial sector for the public good.
Alex Angilella, who's worked on the project since it began, says the research team is excited by the successful demo of this technology and the opportunity to benefit multiple stakeholders moving ahead. These include our government sponsors, industry partners, and ultimately the warfighters using autonomous systems.
"We successfully brought low-cost, open-source commercial hardware into compliance with a new Navy standard," Angilella says. "That's created an on-ramp for government integration and more competition in the defense space."
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