Chinese navy researchers have published a paper explaining how they plan to hunt submarines using ship-launched unmanned aircraft.
The plan, developed by the naval academy in Dalian, China, is to choose the best hunting pattern for a UAS using the power of the genetic algorithm – a search engine that evolves an optimum solution by discarding feeble offspring and breeding the best to make ever stronger ones. The route evolved would make the best use of fuel, cater for air and sea threats and work with dropped sonar buoys.
Abstract:
The route planning is an important part of UAS mission planning, especially for anti-submarine ship-based UAS. When a ship-based UAS searches submarine, it must be planned a route reasonable. Various restricted conditions are considered in this paper, including the capability, oil cost, air threat, and aviatic area. Under the condition of reasonable assumed tactics, an optimal route, which is from the original point to the target point, is planned for the ship-based UAS, with voronoi diagram, Dijkstra algorithm, and genetic algorithm. The method and the result provide an efficacious guarantee for the ship-based UAS to complete the mission of searching submarine.
To download the full paper, click here.
You’d imagine that how a military hunts submarines might be a secret. In WWII, for instance, the airborne hunt for submarines with positional info gleaned from Bletchley Park’s Enigma decrypts was pivotal in winning the battle of the Atlantic. But we learned about that much later. Bletchley was famously Churchill’s goose that “laid the golden eggs but never cackled”.
Why the department of “underwater weaponry and chemical defence” at the academy has revealed its cunning UAS plan – and published it in the journal Advanced Materials Research – is somewhat baffling.
It’s not the first time this has happened. In 2010 Chinese researchers published a treatise on how to hack and trip large chunks of the US electricity grid. This led (after much initial disbelieving spluttering) to much angry rhetoric from aggrieved US commentators, not least the Department of Homeland Security.
China could overtake the United States as the world’s dominant publisher of scientific research by 2013, according to an analysis of global trends in science by the UK’s Royal Society. The Royal Society said that China was now second only to the US in terms of its share of the world’s scientific research papers written in English. The UK has been pushed into third place, with Germany, Japan, France and Canada following behind.
Sources: New Scientist, The Guardian