The Mission Specialist Defender ROV: Weapon of the Week

If you paid attention in grade school, you know 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water

But when we think about weapons used for national defense, the natural inclination is to think of ground or air-based systems. And while it's true most

conflicts do take place on land, there is plenty of area in that 71% of water-covered Earth

for an adversary to look for an advantage. And that's where our Weapon of the Week comes in

Meet the Mission Specialist Defender, built by Video Ray, a company owned by Blue Halo

which we've featured on the show before. The Defender is the U.S. Navy's program of record

for next-generation explosive ordnance disposal response. It can also be used for mobile diving

salvage missions, and security. If you think in terms of find, fix, and finish, right? So find

you're looking for things in the water, and then once you've found something, now you have to

figure out what it is, right? Identify it. Is it a lobster pot or is it a mine? And it has sonars

and video capabilities so that you're able to map the bottom and figure out what these things are

Now you also are going to geo-reference it, right? Geolocate it. That's fixed. So now you know where

it is on the ocean floor and in what depth of water. And then you can finish, right? Which is

some type of effect. That could be to go and put a diver on it or it could be to place an explosive

charge or some type of kinetic end defector to neutralize the mine

It can run off the ship's power or with two different battery solutions Eric Wurstrom the VP of Sales and Business Development for VideoRay says one of the selling points for the Defender is ease of operation

We really designed a user functionality, both in terms of operations and its maintainability

So if you can fly an iPhone, you can fly a mission specialist Defender. The graphic user

interface is designed to be very intuitive and very useful because we know that that is one of

eight missions that a sailor is going to have to do that day. They don't need a PhD in marine

robotics to be able to operate the vehicle. Wistrom says another benefit of the Defender

it's easy to fix and maintain. We have designed this thing to be very modular so that if anything

were to fail in it, a couple of mechanical fasters, an electrical connector, and a quick

sync with an app, and you've got it back in service and in the water where it's meant to be

Built to operate at nearly 1,000 feet below the water's surface, it can go as deep as 3,200 feet

We have some 500 different applications that have been integrated into the Mission Specialist platform

So if there is a use case underwater, we likely have a solution

We're focused on the platform. We make it very easy for our industry partners to be able to integrate

both in terms of software applications and sensors and kinetic effectors. Another likely selling point for the Navy when it came to inking a deal for the Defender program

its proven track record. The British and Australian navies have been using the ROV since 2017