The future of naval design: Serco’s No Mariners Required Ship program (NOMARS)

Australian Defence Magazine Podcast

In this episode, Grant McHerron talks with Rob Slaven, Defence Business Development Director at Serco Asia-Pacific, and Ryan Maatta, Marine Engineering Manager at Serco North America, about their involvement with DARPA's No Mariners Required Ship (NOMARS) program.

We get an insight into how the NOMARS program is adapting available off the shelf technologies to build an uncrewed vessel that can stay at sea for a year, with autonomous navigation and refuelling. The discussion explores the balance between automation and human intervention, the collaboration between Serco and DARPA, and the scope for the next phase's construction of the system. We get an understanding of the logistics of the vessel, maintenance redundancies, decreased cost of operations, and its potential to operate with the Australian Navy.

We wrap up by discussing how Serco are working with other companies and technologies to deliver the vessel, and how the design of the NOMARS varies from typical crewed vessels.

LINKS:

Serco's NOMARS team is reshaping the future of unmanned maritime operations:

www.serco.com/na/media-and-news/2022/sercos-nomars-team-is-reshaping-the-future-of-unmanned-maritime-operations

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Editor: Chris Visscher

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