US Military to Deploy Robotic Ghost Ships This Fall

How do you keep track of increasingly stealthy Russian, Chinese, and Iranian submarines? If you're the U.S. military, you build a robotic ghost ship to follow them around the high seas.

In 2010, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced that they were building a 132-foot autonomous boat to track quiet, diesel-powered submarines. The program was dubbed Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV.

To little notice, the system earlier this year passed a critical test, moving much closer to actual deployment and potentially changing not just naval warfare but also the way humans, ships, and robotic systems interact across the world's waters.

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