This robotic maritime bomb squad keeps humans a safe distance away
The 40-foot-long uncrewed surface vehicle and a yellow sonar unit. (Thales /)At the end of this year the French and British navies will start testing a prototype of a new anti-mine system, designed to detect, identify, and even destroy dangerous mines all while keeping humans far away from them. It’s called the Maritime Mine Counter Measures (MMCM) system, and it is being developed by French defense electronics group, Thales, and its partners.Maritime mines are “simple, cheap, efficient, improvised explosive devices of the sea favored by poorer states and terrorist organizations,” says Antoine Caput, Thales’s MMCM program director.These modern mines can be on the seabed, moored, or floating and drifting, but they’re not the only threat of their kind to shipping. Hundreds of thousands of unrecovered mines remain around Europe’s coastlines, according to Caput—they’re a dangerous legacy of both World Wars. Now 80 years old, their detonation systems are unlikely to...