Israel introduces Katana unmanned combat marine system

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has developed new unmanned surface vehicles (USV), known as Katana for homeland security.

The combat marine system is integrated with autonomous navigation and a collision avoidance system as well as various payloads including electro-optic and infrared cameras, line-of-sight and none-line-of- sight communication, radar and weapon systems, Xinhua reports.

Developed by IAI’s Malam factory, the craft can support a variety of missions including protection of exclusive economic zones (EEZ), maritime borders and offshore gas rigs and pipelines, as well as port security, shallow waters patrolling, and electronic warfare
Capable of performing fully-autonomous operation, the vehicle can identify, track and classify targets both far and near to provide real-time intelligence imagery and can engage targets if required.

Xinhua reports IAI executive as saying, "It is the result of an ongoing development process which lasted many years."

The dual operational mode of the system enables fully autonomous operation, controlled through an advanced command and control station, as well as for a manned combat operational mode.

Recently, the company has developed complete family of instrumentation test-range radars consisting of the ELM-2088 SIS single target radar instrumentation system, the ELM-2086c Cinbad compact multi-target radar, and the ELM-2086i Sky Beam long-range multi-target.