Big robot boats

Donnelly Bohan: I remember thinking, you're telling me we're going to create a boat that can go out for weeks, months without anybody on it, and it's not going to run into anything? I probably shook my head, and I wasn't sure I was hitting the I believe button yet.

Bridget Bell: Welcome to MindSET, a Leidos podcast. I'm your host, Bridget Bell.

Meghan Good: And I'm your host, Meghan Good. Join us as we talk with pioneers in science, engineering and technology to understand their creative mindset and share their stories of innovation. In this week's episode of MindSET, we sat down with Donnelly Bohan to talk maritime autonomy, and we learned how she grew up with the company and what really maritime autonomy is.

Bridget Bell: In the discussion, we talked a lot about what the US Navy is doing in terms of building more autonomous vessels and really balancing out their portfolio of possible assets that they can use to run missions and how, by having an autonomous ship, you can do different things in different places to really help support the war fighter.

Meghan Good: And it sounds like her team is so energized by that. One of the things that I really enjoyed hearing from her was how excited her employees are to be making a difference for the Navy, for the war fighters and also being able to see their hard work come to life in this autonomous vessel.

Bridget Bell: You're right. When she was talking about how the Sea Hunter was the first fully autonomous vessel to make it all the way across the ocean, to Hawaii and back. I really liked that she also walked us through some of the challenges that they faced and how, no matter what, it's still a program in an effort where we had to meet advanced schedules and still deliver a really high quality product that you can't even touch and control on the water.

Meghan Good: And she does that by working with teams across the country and with all of these diverse areas of expertise and dispersed location, but she gets them all excited to be working and rowing in the same direction. Pun not intended.

Bridget Bell: Well, to our listeners. Listen in. Learn about the coolest expansion of the acronym BRB.

Meghan Good: All right. Let's dive in.

Bridget Bell: Welcome to MindSET. Today, we're speaking with Leidos Vice President and Maritime Systems Division Manager, Donnelly Bohan, to learn more about maritime autonomy. Donnelly has more than 20 years of experience in business management, process improvement and operations for various industries. Welcome, Donnelly. We're so excited to talk to you today.

Donnelly Bohan: Thanks, Bridget. I appreciate it.

Bridget Bell: So let's start with talking about your career journey. What is your current role with Leidos, and how did you get started in this field?

Donnelly Bohan: Right. So currently, I've been the Division Manager for Maritime Systems for about three years. Prior to that, I've had a over 17 year career with the company back to the SAIC days. So I've been able to see the company change and grow and improve to the Leidos we know today. I grew up in the company, I consider it, on an Air Force team with a lot of focus on R&D and S&T at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I did that for about the first half of my career and then had the opportunity about 10 years ago to move over to the Navy environment. I was able to learn quite a bit about the programs that I currently have in the division. They have morphed and grown and changed as our programs do. And I took on different roles in the maritime domain. I was a business manager. I was a deputy operations manager, and then most recently a division manager for the last three years.

Bridget Bell: So coming out of school, what was your idea of what would your career look like? Did you jump straight into kind of this autonomy field?

Donnelly Bohan: Not at all. Like, I think, many of us, we're not quite sure where we're going to end up as we're coming out of school with a bachelor's degree. My undergrad is actually in health administration. I thought I would end up in a leadership role in a hospital portfolio, and that didn't come together quite as I expected. I did some internships, and it wasn't maybe quite as I thought it was going to be. And I ended up transitioning to work for the state of Illinois on a technology challenge grant. So I jumped right into cutting edge technologies. And at that time, we were in a different economic state with state governments. They had a lot of surplus budget, and they were able to help small businesses that were bridging the gap in startup funds. And the state money would be used many times for efforts that sippers would not pay for.

Donnelly Bohan: One of them, for example, would be IP protection. That is not something you can pay for with a small business innovative research grant. So I was able to see the depth of the portfolio in the state of Illinois coming out of the universities, coming out of incubators and able to choose, just similar to how we have it in Department of Defense. We had a fixed budget. We wanted to spend the money wisely and share it with small businesses to help them grow. And obviously, it was all part of an economic development growth engine for the state.

Meghan Good: It's pretty neat how that's translated into what you do today and where you're looking at this portfolio of programs across maritime, and more specifically, maritime autonomy. With that, we keep using the word maritime autonomy, but I've also heard of unmanned surface vehicles and unmanned underwater vehicles. So what's really the range of technologies of the future that's all included in maritime autonomy?

Donnelly Bohan: That's a great question. Maritime autonomy is huge and unlimited and I would say not fully defined as we still see this technology being integrated into the mission sets. And I'm focused on the US Navy is where my mindset is, but it also applies to many commercial operations, oil and gas. Focused on where Leidos is, where my division focuses is on the defense side of things. And when I think of maritime autonomy, I think of any type of mission or ConOps where we have the opportunity to allow a sensor or a platform, like you said, an unmanned surface vessel or an unmanned underwater vessel, do a mission completely without humans involved. Obviously, we want to save our military and keep them safe at all costs, and this is a huge advantage to keeping the training of the US military on the most complex missions and allowing the autonomy to do ones that saves them from potentially the dull, the dirty, the most dangerous of the missions.

Donnelly Bohan: So as Leidos is employing maritime autonomy, we are focused quite a bit on how to put them on unmanned surface vessels and how to off-board many of the missions to those vehicles. In addition, we're also looking to employ autonomy into the unmanned underwater vehicle market to do a same similar missions as what we would see with USV. It's just underwater.

Meghan Good: Oh, thanks for that because there really is this range, as you say, and it's something that's evolving over time. We even used the wrong word. It's not vehicles. They're vessels. It's a different lexicon, and I'm sure that's developing over time with defense customers in the way they're speaking and envisioning new applications of these kinds of platforms that you're building.

Donnelly Bohan: They interchange vehicles and vessels quite a bit, so you're on target as much as I am.

Bridget Bell: I actually wanted to ask, as we're talking over this kind of overarching technology, how does AIML play into that?

Donnelly Bohan: Artificial intelligence, one would say, is embedded in the algorithms that are used for our autonomy to behave. Machine learning is the next level. I personally find we have to be exceptionally careful, as does the US Navy, in my opinion, I'm not speaking for the Navy, as machine learning is introduced because we want to make sure that the machine learning does not conflict with any of the COLREGs work that we have spent the last over seven years developing. COLREGs are the rules of the road in the water. It tells you which vessels you would stand off, meaning you would stop, you would not just like when you're driving. If you see a semi and you're in a Toyota Corolla, you're probably going to let that semi have the right of way. There's a whole series of rules when you're on the water on a surface vessel, and we've spent many years developing that COLREGs. And that was sort of our big first gold star in our autonomy development around the Sea Hunter program that DARPA funded and moved to ONR and is now moved to the US Navy, is that we passed. We were able to make sure that our vessel was COLREGs compliant.

Donnelly Bohan: A lot of times people say, how did you do that? And it was through an extensive risk reduction in our system integration lab program. We have a team of hardware and software down in Long Beach, Mississippi. That is where we will run thousands of hours of simulation on the autonomy software to make sure it's behaving as we expected. Once we think it's in pretty good shape on the SIL runs, we have a test vessel. It's called the Research Vessel Pathfinder. It's about a 40-foot work boat, and it has the same autonomy package on it that we would employ on the Sea Hunter program. So we have a mirrored system. Once we think we're ready, as I said, we'll go out and do on-sea testing with the RV Pathfinder. That's for us to really make sure when we put it on Sea Hunter, we are ready to go. A feedback loop comes back to the autonomy team. It's an agile software team split between Arlington, Virginia and down in Long Beach. And that's part of the magic, in my opinion, on how Leidos has been so successful in autonomy development.

Bridget Bell: Wow. And as the maritime systems division manager, you lead all these teams from rest in Virginia down to Mississippi, on the seas. So they're really across the country, and they're all very diverse in their skillset to really test and ensure that these autonomous vessels, that Sea Hunter, is acting as it should. So how do you manage this diverse and really dispersed workforce to drive these incredible results and create this amazing technology?

Donnelly Bohan: It is a diverse team. We are all over the country. The software teams for Sea Hunter primarily in Virginia and Mississippi. My biggest advice to myself is you just hire really good people, and then you get out of their way. We've been fortunate to carefully hire exceptionally talented individuals. When I talk about the autonomy Sea Hunter team, I can't do anything but smile because they are a team of primarily 20-somethings that are really just rock stars for the company. They bring so much energy and dynamics to the whole division. They are as exceptionally diverse team, probably over half female and over half diverse on the team. When we've talked to them about why did you come here, what do you think about Leidos, what made it special, and you'll hear them say big robot boats with a big smile on their face. And that makes us very excited.

Donnelly Bohan: They tell us that their friends went to some of the big guys, the Googles, the Apples, the Amazons, which I would think are going to be our toughest competition when we look at recruiting. And they tell me the reason they stay is because we've empowered them to go work on something where they see the results, and they get the fact that they are keeping our war fighters safe by the ability to put autonomy out there on something like Sea Hunter, on something like the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab has some logistic boats we've done demos on. They've seen us do it on our own vessels. They love that. They love the fact that they are able to see what they're working on. They're not stuck in a cube. They're able to travel. We trust them to go out, make good decisions and do great work for the future of the autonomy.

Bridget Bell: I love two of the things you said, the hire good people and get out of the way and that you can just hear the excitement, both in your description and then how these employees are feeling and acting with the big robot boats. That is amazing.

Meghan Good: I was thinking with big robot boats, when you first heard the idea about that, obviously you've been with maritime for a while and you come from a business and operations background, but what was your first reaction to hearing that we would be building such a technology and then you would be the one driving that development?

Donnelly Bohan: So I joined the maritime team, the Navy focused team, right as we were transitioning from the phase one bid of DARPA, which was a kind of design and conceptual, to phase two. That proposal was going in. It was hard fought. It had leadership of great individuals, like Dr. John Fragameco, helping us shape that to put it together. And I was with them as we won it. And I remember thinking, you're telling me we're going to create a boat that can go out for weeks, months without anybody on it, and it's not going to run into anything? I probably shook my head, and I wasn't sure I was hitting the I believe button yet. But as I saw the team come together and progress and under the leadership of Rus Cook, who has been our program manager across this portfolio and has brought Brad [Given 00:14:45] online to help with the Sea Hunter II, these guys are awesome.

Donnelly Bohan: I think of our big discriminators in this area is I would guess over 80% of the team that has worked on this portfolio for the last seven or eight years are all still intact, and all we're doing is adding to the team. So the ability to maintain those lessons learned and that commitment. And let's be honest, it's all about people and the loyalty that team has to each other and that dedication to do what's right to make it work is why we're able to be where we are today in this arena and be, in my opinion, the leader in autonomy.

Bridget Bell: So looking outside of Leidos, it seems like autonomy, and maritime autonomy specifically, is really getting more and more attention from government and industry. What do you think is driving the recent growth in this area?

Donnelly Bohan: I think we have to look at history, what has been done with the budgets around vessels in the Navy. We've heard, and there's been many articles just in the last quarter around how do we get to 355 assets. I'm not going to say ships because I think it's going to be a blend of things. We have not been able to fund some of these things to the levels we needed, and our ability to fund at the levels required if we were going to build very large fleets, aircraft carriers, is not going to be tolerable from the budget. So I think looking at the fact of bringing autonomous vessels in, you can offload some of the missions that these larger ships were doing previously and put them on smaller vessels. Something medium and large or both have been announced in our acquisitions in the press. What that allows, then, is those most critical, the human manned where the training and the complexity lives, those vessels can get a bit smaller because they have offloaded some of this work to these unmanned autonomous vessels. And that makes them more cost efficient also.

Donnelly Bohan: And I think it's the blend, how complementary it would be to have the fleet mix of manned, complex, critical vessels teamed with medium, unmanned surface vessels and large, is the future of the Navy. I think there's been so much activity because we saw a big budget jump, and it's been somewhat debated in Congress and by the Navy on how to fund it, when to fund it, what the dollars are, what the missions are, what the ConOps are. And I think that's why we've seen so much activity around it. It's a growing business. It's cool stuff. Like I said, big robot boats. This retains talent. This allow us to recruit. And I think everybody's pretty interested in it because I think it's where the Navy's future lies, and they're determining how the best mix of these assets come together.

Bridget Bell: Well, there's no doubt that there is a portfolio management challenge, like you say, and even a mission management, how you balance out between different kinds of vessels. I wonder too, when you talk about your team, and it sounds like a team I want to work on, it's very tight knit, and they're coming up with really interesting results. You mentioned a little bit about a challenge with the funding situation. And I wonder, can you give us an example of one of those deliveries that was really difficult to do, something that you and the team struggled with, and then how you overcame it?

Donnelly Bohan: I think that the flagship item to talk about is the voyage that Sea Hunter made to Hawaii and back. It would have been a year ago last fall. And the Navy and ONR and Admiral Hahn at ONR are to be commended. They said, let's kick the tires, no pun intended, on a surface vessel. Let's see what this can do. What can we do with this autonomy? And Dr. Bob Risalara, who was our program manager, they decided to do the testing faster and let's get ramped up and let's go to Hawaii. And now hindsight being 20/20, when I've talked to dr. on how things are going, he can't believe what we are able to accomplish in the time, especially around the autonomy team. So we set off for the first time, first ever, from San Diego to go to Hawaii. Were there a couple hiccups on the way over? Yes.

Donnelly Bohan: We did board a couple of times on the way over, mainly to learn what was going on so that we could feed that feedback loop in to make sure we were making those corrections. We got to Hawaii. It successfully participated in some exercises that the Navy determined, and then it came back without any boardings. So we did make some tweaks in Hawaii so that it could return without any issues. That's huge. And that was one of the pieces when I talk about that young autonomy team being so excited, they were in the trenches with that. They were doing 24/7 shifts keeping track of it and monitoring it at all times, obviously, because this was a demonstration and a lesson learned, and we wanted to gather as much data as possible. I was nervous. I was participating in some exercises supporting our Leidos Australia team who's growing into maritime, and we were monitoring it 24/7 from Australia also. But it was a huge success for the company, a huge success for the team, huge success for the Navy. And we had so many lessons learned that we've been able to bring back in and loop into our design and into our autonomy for future efforts.

Bridget Bell: And that was the first autonomous vessel to make an ocean crossing. Right?

Donnelly Bohan: Right. So let me clarify, autonomous vessel. When Leidos, when we, the team, the division, talk about it, Sea Hunter was the first one built from the keel up. And when I say that, I mean every decision that was made around that vessel, around reliability, around redundancy, all had in mind that this was going to be autonomous. No one was going to be on it to go flip a switch or say, "Hey, Tommy, go down below and turn that valve." All of that, that whole nervous system of how a boat works, had to be able to operate autonomously. The fact that is what we were able to do, no other vessel of the size of Sea Hunter had ever been built with that in mind and able to do that type of voyage.

Bridget Bell: That is incredible. No wonder your team is so enthusiastic and so excited about their work. That's amazing. So I have to ask, with that accomplishment, what's next? How do you see maritime autonomy changing in the next two years, five years?

Donnelly Bohan: It's super exciting. We're at the cutting edge of the employment of this wonderful new technology into a new ConOps for the United States Navy. Right now the Navy has just put out acquisitions around medium unmanned surface vessels and around large. I think they see they will be complementary. The medium more of an ISR node, going out there, being able to do multiple missions, smaller, more agile. And LUSV is larger. If anybody read in the news, there's a lot of discussion at the Pentagon if an LUSV would shoot weapons. That's pretty controversial, but there still are many missions where a much a larger vessel, probably almost twice the size the length of the medium, is going to be a requirement. I think in the next years, we will start to see vessels actually built with autonomy leading the way versus just being about building a wonderful ship.

Donnelly Bohan: I think it's going to be great to watch, as I mentioned earlier, how these complement the ships that are already in the fleet and that will be coming online. And we'll just continue to develop new ConOps missions. And every time that happens, we usually have to add what we call behaviors to the autonomy. So what's a behavior? If you think of something like a survey mission, a survey mission would be to go get a map of the sea floor. This is usually for safe navigation. The way that is done now is on a manned ship with a lot of folks, and it takes a lot of time and energy. And the behavior that we have to put to do that autonomously is I would call it mowing the grass. You're going back and forth and making sure you don't leave anything on uncut, no what we would call a holiday in the survey arena. When we do something like that, our autonomy would know, hey, if there's an asset coming, they would have to do a COLREGs maneuver. So that's the rules of the road. So they would behave as if it was a manned ship so that the other there's confidence and either give away or stop or whatever, depends on what the other asset is.

Donnelly Bohan: And then it would remember when it comes back that's where I left my mowing the grass, and I'm going to fill that section in. We've done and demonstrated up to that point so far. The next evolution of that autonomy is that it would be looking at the data it is collecting during that survey mission, and it would recognize while it was still out there that they knew it had some bad data. Maybe the water was murky, there was an issue. It would know to go back out and go ahead and re-scan that part of the survey area before it returned home. So the what's so cool about that is, one, you can imagine if that was a manned ship and they weren't able to check their data until they came back to shore and then they realized they had some bad areas or it missed something, then you have to man the ship again and go back out. The cost is incredible when you have to go back and forth for something like that. I think that's where autonomy goes in the future. I think survey is a great mission. I think logistics is going to be a great early mission to start getting folks to hit I believe on this and then implementing it into more complex and dangerous missions as folks get more and more comfortable with it.

Meghan Good: So I think you really hit on what's next. And what's exciting about this next chapter for maritime autonomy. But outside of maritime, where else do you see autonomy making such a big impact, if only for the Navy, since that's your frame of reference, but beyond as well?

Donnelly Bohan: So I think you have to look to commercial pretty quickly. We've seen a lot of press about Google Cars. We've seen Amazon is going to deliver your packages via a drone. All of those have aspects of autonomy. I think with congestion in larger cities as we've seen populations start to change and they are more co-located in larger urban areas and rural populations are getting smaller and smaller, the ability to move that with the congestion that's going to occur in urban environments, to be able to use something like a drone. If we can get Google Cars to work correctly and that speeds up traffic and takes the user error out of it. I think these are all things that are coming. Sometimes I wonder. I think there's a joke that in The Jetsons, it said something about 2020 and we'd have flying cars, and those were all autonomous. I don't know if we'll see it in our lifetime, but I think we're going to see a lot of energy and work go into seeing where we will see autonomous all around us in our daily lives.

Bridget Bell: You mentioned the Jetsons, and it does have kind of this Sci-Fi feel, but we're making it real. We're making it safe. We're making it functional.

Meghan Good: Well, Donnelly, I have another question about your team and your coworkers. I think one thing that's interesting is figuring out new things about our coworkers that we really didn't know. One thing that I find interesting about you and me is we share our backgrounds with Leidos and SAIC. And really, Donnelly, you started working here three weeks before me, and we both got MBAs through the company way back when. Now, I wonder with your team, what's one thing that your coworkers don't know about you?

Donnelly Bohan: This is a tough one. A few of them probably know this, and it's near and dear to my heart. If somebody says how'd you learn this what'd you really do, I grew up and my parents owned sports bars. I learned a lot about people and negotiations pretty young. My father primarily ran the business, and he had us doing double entry bookkeeping as 10 and 12-year-olds. And I was writing payroll and knew how to do the taxes when I was probably a young teenager. I'm not a 100% I knew exactly what I was doing, but as I got older and saw how the business occurred and then was able to come into Leidos, it's not much different. It's making sure you work really closely with your vendors and your subcontractors, that you shake your hand, that you have values that Leidos has picked an excellent set of six now with adding inclusion. But that business and working with people, working with customers, it taught me a lot about how I wanted to work in an environment like this.

Donnelly Bohan: My father got sick when I was in my late twenties, and I took a leave of absence at the time and went home. And I ran the bar for a couple months while he got some treatment. And it was amazing talking to the liquor team and the beer teams and the food folks. I learned a lot about people and negotiations and all skills that I'm able to bring back into Leidos every day. And I, I think of them fondly.

Meghan Good: From beer and burgers to big robot boats. They're not too much different.

Donnelly Bohan: That may hurt some people's heads, but that's what I would say.

Meghan Good: So talking about your early career coming into the business, what advice would you have for engineers or others thinking about getting into a maritime autonomy that are excited about these big robot boats? What would you tell them?

Donnelly Bohan: So, one, if they want to learn about it, if they want to know about it, just raise your hand. Give me a call. Richard Bowers runs that team and has done an insanely great job of recruiting and retaining those folks. We started many of them as interns that then flipped over to full-time employees as they were finishing up their undergrad degrees. We've taught many of these folks what it means to practice in industry versus what they learned in the classroom. And I've been fortunate with our intern team. We had, I think, gosh, probably over 20 this last year. I asked them, "Hey, are you getting prepared in the universities? How much of what we were able to expose you to this year was new?" I was impressed. The universities are getting them ready. They said a lot of it seemed theoretical to them, though, in the classroom.

Donnelly Bohan: And when they were able to come into Leidos and they were able to partner with folks not much older than them, like I've said, most of this team is kind of this is their first career, a lot of them in their twenties, they were able to apply a lot of what they've learned in school and able to make it much more meaningful for them. And they were able to tell me areas that they thought they were going to focus in as they were sophomores and juniors, that they were going to go back and pick different areas based on their experience with us. But if you're interested in autonomy, we are constantly hiring to the software team. You just got to let us know. We're happy to sit down and talk to you and make sure you're a good fit for the team.

Donnelly Bohan: They are very careful that they maintain the culture. I know one of the things Richard, the hiring manager, looks for is folks that have been in group events and worked with teams previously in their undergrad. He said folks that have worked with their high school and college bands are really great when you put them in this dynamic team environment on our software team, which I thought that was a really neat takeaway after talking to Richard, is the linkage to working in groups, working with a band has made them really prepared to work in an agile software environment like we have on the autonomy team.

Meghan Good: And also have fun while they're working because I'm sure in their high school bands or groups, they're having fun with their friends while they're doing what they need to do. And so to carry that culture through, through college, through internships and then after, to keep the fun and excitement in the job sounds really important.

Donnelly Bohan: Yeah, they, they are awesome. I'm fortunate that my office is down the hall from most of this team. And you will hear laughter and fun going on down there. I think they'll probably be thrilled that I brought this up, but there was a hot sauce eating contest, I think, not too long ago. And there was some hoops and hollers going on down the hall. But it's great to have them. They bring a whole set of energy to the office. Every holiday is fun. Halloween is a hoot. We have a great time with them, but it's awesome to have them. And they're just doing a great job.

Bridget Bell: You're now going to find Megan and I coming to visit your office more often and seeing what contests are going on.

Donnelly Bohan: It wouldn't take much to get one fired up if you come by. Don't worry about that. They're always ready.

Meghan Good: Thank you for sharing about your mindset and really emphasizing how important it is about the people we work with, the technology we develop, but then the reason we do it, supporting these amazing missions that are so vital and important to the world. Thank you, Donnelly.

Donnelly Bohan: No, I appreciate it. The team's honored to be able to do this, not only for the company, but also for the United States Navy and ultimately for the war fighter, as I've said, there's loyalty and there's commitment on this team that I, I have not seen on many other teams, so we're proud to be a lighthouse. We're proud to be doing this work. And we're super excited about what the future of autonomy holds and how Leidos is going to be able to be an industry leader.

Bridget Bell: Well, thank you again. And thanks to our audience for listening to MindSET. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your colleagues and visit leidos.com/mindset. And if you're specifically interested in maritime autonomy, visit leidos.com/autonomy.