General Dynamics Mission Systems Opens New UUV Manufacturing Site

In an August ceremony at General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Taunton facility, company officials as well as representatives from the U.S. Navy formally opened the General Dynamics Mission Systems Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (UUV) Manufacturing and Assembly Center of Excellence.

The repurposed manufacturing space at General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Taunton facility will provide manufacturing, assembly, integration and testing capabilities for General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Knifefish and Bluefin Robotics UUVs. Knifefish is a medium-class Mine Countermeasure (MCM) UUV that provides enhanced mine-hunting capability by detecting, classifying and identifying both buried mines and mines in high clutter environments. The company’s family of Bluefin Robotics products consists of UUVs and related technologies that provide an array of underwater sensor capabilities for defense, commercial and scientific customers worldwide.

The UUV center of excellence will utilize a portion of Taunton’s 500,000+ square feet facility. In addition to the UUV center of excellence, the Taunton facility develops several communications capabilities for the U.S. Army as well as provides engineering, manufacturing and production support for many General Dynamics Mission Systems programs.

“Opening this manufacturing and assembly facility allows us to leverage the highly skilled and extremely experienced Taunton workforce. This skill set found in our Taunton employees is exactly the type of expertise we need to manufacture highly reliable UUVs,” said vice president and general manager of General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Maritime and Strategic Systems business, Carlo Zaffanella. “We have expanded our maritime operations to include the Taunton UUV Manufacturing and Assembly Center of Excellence to produce our existing best in class small and medium UUVs and allow for additional expansion space for growth on future UUV programs of all sizes. This location was specifically selected to provide additional capacity that will allow for larger scaling and optimization of UUV production with purpose-built manufacturing cells, fixtures, and special test equipment, while maintaining proximity to our Bluefin Robotics Engineering Team in Quincy.”