October 9, 2019, by navaltoday

Northrop Grumman announced it has operated the AQS-24 minehunting sonar at depths greater than 400 feet during system testing off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Embarked on the M/V Richard Becker, the Northrop Grumman test team demonstrated the sonar performance of AQS-24 at all tested depths, while using the system to classify bottom objects of interest.

“The AQS-24 minehunting system performed superbly at tow depths up to and beyond 400 feet,” said Alan Lytle, vice president, undersea systems, Northrop Grumman. “This latest internal research and development effort underscores our commitment to provide the most innovative, affordable and operationally-proven capabilities to meet the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) Mine Countermeasures Mission (MCM) package requirements and future expeditionary MCM needs.”

Earlier this year, Northrop Grumman demonstrated an autonomy upgrade path for the AQS-24’s minehunting system by integrating and successfully testing the company’s image exploitation suite, incorporating state-of-the-art machine learning for automatic target recognition (ATR) using multiple ATR algorithms.

The company said the US Navy plans to incorporate this new capability into existing AQS-24 minehunting systems following the demonstration.

The success of Deep Tow is now followed by the recently commenced in-water testing of Northrop Grumman’s AQS-24 system on the Navy’s MCM unmanned surface vessel (USV) at Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City. This is in preparation for user operated evaluation system testing aboard the LCS in 2020. The AQS-24’s newly doubled depth capability is planned for integration and test with the MCM USV system.