U.S. Coast Guard Augments Border Surveillance With Monitoring Buoys
The Coast Guard is getting ready to try out a new kind of maritime domain awareness system off San Diego, a longtime hotspot for maritime migrant smuggling. It will be deploying four powered buoys from OPT for "persistent and resident" surveillance off the coast.
The PowerBuoy is a large energy generation platform with a 30-foot spar beneath the surface. Once envisioned as a wave-powered product, it has been refocused on solar power and wind. It weighs up to 16 tonnes, and can generate up to 4 kW from solar panels, plus more from two small wind turbines. A large battery-bank rounds out the power package, which can support a wide variety of powered payloads.
Each PowerBuoy will be fitted with an array of surveillance devices and networked using OPT's intelligence network system, Merrows, which links sensor and surveillance information from multiple maritime platforms.
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The four buoys will be paired with a set of surveillance towers from Anduril Industries, which will keep an eye from shore. The towers are autonomously enabled for spotting targets up to five miles away. All of the data will feed into the Anduril Lattice surveillance platform, the company's AI-enabled sensor networking and anomaly-detection software system.
The area in question is a known trafficking route, and Coast Guard patrol boats in the San Diego area frequently pursue migrant smuggling operators off the coast, occasionally using force to compel compliance. The smugglers' boat-landing methods can be dangerous, and many immigrants have lost their lives in capsizings in the surf zone - another reason for the Coast Guard to carry out careful monitoring in the area. In November, four people were killed in a migrant boat capsizing in Imperial Beach, prompting a search and rescue operation.
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