A Portchester, Hampshire team, formerly ASV Global, that designs and builds uncrewed boats which drive themselves, now part of L3Harris.
L3Harris ASV, which used to be called ASV Global, designs and builds uncrewed boats. ASV stands for autonomous surface vehicle, a boat that can navigate by itself or be controlled by someone far away. The Hampshire team has built a family of vessels for tasks such as seabed survey, surveillance and protecting ships and ports. Its control software, called ASView, lets one operator manage a boat or several. A 2019 article describes the MAST 13, a 13 metre high-speed boat that can be fully autonomous, designed, built and commissioned by the team on the UK south coast.
ASV Global was based in Portchester, near Portsmouth, before it was bought by the American defence group L3 Technologies, which later became L3Harris. The company that bought it said that autonomous capabilities for surface ships and undersea vessels were top priorities for its customers. The buyer then expanded the Portchester team's work into areas like anti-submarine warfare, unmanned sensors and combined operation of uncrewed boats and underwater vehicles. We did not find a mission statement from the team itself, and the sources we read do not give the year of the takeover.
The UK customer in the sources is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, known as Dstl, which has worked with the Portchester team since 2014 on robotic boats for Royal Navy concepts and as a test platform for new sensors and software. Earlier boats in the family took part in the Unmanned Warrior exercise in 2016 and Autonomous Warrior in 2018, and one operated autonomously at NATO's REPMUS exercise in Portugal. The MAST 13 was launched at the DSEI defence show in London in September 2019. The University of Southampton also took delivery of an ASV Global C-Cat 3 research vessel in 2017.
We found little on culture. Alasdair Gilchrist, a Dstl programme manager, was quoted in 2019 inviting other organisations to test algorithms, sensors and payloads on the vessel, which points to a team that shares its boats as test platforms. Because L3Harris is a large group, the working setting is a defence engineering business, with the security and clearance arrangements that go with it.
Roles in a team like this include naval architects and marine engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers, software and autonomy engineers, trials and operations specialists who run the boats at sea, and project, supply-chain and finance staff. Subjects such as engineering, maths, computing and physics are common starting points. Look at the L3Harris UK careers pages for roles at Portchester.
Website: www.l3harris.com
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