Metal Shark Boats of Louisiana has been selected to develop and implement the Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel (LRUSV) system for the US Marine Corps.
This tiered, scalable weapons system will provide the marine corps with the ability to accurately track and destroy targets at range throughout the battle space. While fully autonomous, the vessels may be optionally manned and will be able to carry multiple payloads.
The vessels will also be capable of autonomously launching and retrieving payloads.
The autonomous navigation system for the LRUSVs will be provided by Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) subsidiary Spatial Integrated Systems (SIS).
Under an other transaction authority (OTA) agreement with Marine Corps Systems Command, Metal Shark will design, build, test, and implement the vessels and will handle the integration of the autonomy system and an advanced command and control (C2) software suite.
In addition to providing the autonomous LRUSVs, Metal Shark will also produce manned support vessels for the LRUSV system. These manned vessels will utilise the same design as the 12-metre aluminium patrol boats that Metal Shark is currently building for the US Navy.
