The weapon of the week is Metal Shark’s Prowler — a new unmanned surface vessel (USV) that could help out the Navy and Marine Corps. Ryan Robertson had a conversation with the president and CEO of Metal Shark, Christopher Allard, at the U.S. Navy League’s annual exposition for America’s maritime forces and commercial partners.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ryan Robertson: Chris, thanks so much for joining us today. The Prowler — tell me about this thing.
Christopher Allard: Yeah, it’s a pretty cool product. So the last five or six years, we’ve been working on autonomous vessels, different Coast Guard, Navy, Marine Corps [USVs]. Learned a lot and wanted to take an opportunity to develop something. It really wasn’t targeted at a specific set of requirements, we could tailor it to what we thought some of the options could be done.
A couple of things about [the Prowler], she’s about 30 feet long, inboard diesel powered but also autonomous. She has a self-powered front wheel that allows her to kind of climb a ramp and move around a base [at] three to five miles an hour. Not long range, just getting in and out of the water on its own. And then the front wheel retracts and the rear wheels are over the road highway rated. It is its own trailer, we learned a lot about how hard it is sometimes in a USV mission, when it starts at location A, moves to location B and it didn’t bring its own trailer, didn’t bring its own support system. So [we’re] working to try and get it to be self-sufficient in those kind of applications.
It’s also semi-submersible. It wasn’t in the original design brief, but one of my engineers and I were looking at it, and we realized that it wasn’t that hard. The boats are a boat in a boat, if you will. There’s a box in the middle. The box is watertight carries the engine, the fuel, the autonomy systems, all the things that it takes to operate. And then the outer part of the boat is basically tanks free to flood. [The Prowler] operates at speed like a normal boat, but when she stops, she kind of automatically ingests water into these tanks creates a lower profile, which [in] certain applications is nice from a visibility or lack of perspective.
[It also] makes them more sea kindly on station, so the extra water… keeps the boat more stable for both the sensors and also for survivability higher sea states that it might have to live through.
Ryan Robertson: So you said you’re you’re working with Marines and the Navy right now, there’s no contracts yet. But you’re working to hopefully get to that point. Is that correct?
Christopher Allard: We still have an ongoing contract with the Marines in support of the [Long Range USV], but we’re certainly at the tail end of it. The boats have been fielded, the Marines have been operating them. But that one’s still ongoing.
Ryan Robertson: What’s next for Prowler? What’s the future?
Christopher Allard: Part of coming [to the exposition] and doing what we’re doing…is to get feedback, see what ideas hit home, what [doesn’t], and understand what people are trying to do. We are moving into developing our own command and control system that will give us the ability to control [the Prowlers]. That’s not done yet. But that would be what was what would be next… we want to make it a turnkey solution that will then just interface with a software only with autonomy providers, [unmanned aerial vehicle] providers, automatic target recognition providers. That’s not our space, but we can provide the host system that makes them ready to ready to do that with a software update, that kind of thing.
To hear the entire conversation with Christopher Allard, listen to Weapons and Warfare podcast and learn more about where the Prowler is in the market now as well as the Navy and Marine Corps’ need for surface vessels.
Access the full Weapons and Warfare episode here.
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