NUWC Division, Keyport SAISON team receives ‘Point of the Spear Support’ Command Award
The award recognizes teams that demonstrate exceptional innovation while delivering high-impact support to the Fleet. The SAISON team—led by David Valiente, Gavin Whiteaker and Tonya Shuler, and building on work begun by Danny Hubert and Andrew Arnold—received the award in recognition of their efforts to streamline submarine maintenance by replacing time-consuming manual inspection work with automated processes.
"The SAISON Team truly embodies the 'Point of the Spear' mindset,” stated the award citation. “By deploying industry-proven robotics side-by-side with the Fleet, they improved submarine maintenance and are delivering opportunities to reduce inspection times. Their work directly enhances mission readiness by solving critical fleet bottlenecks, making them exceptionally deserving of this award.”
The SAISON team took existing commercial technologies and adapted them for the unique environments of naval submarines. The team tested its technology directly on the waterfront, which sped up the validation process and enabled Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility to acquire and adopt the new tool in just 18 months.
"We knew that industry had solutions and that industry was using these solutions to perform nondestructive testing and inspections in commercial spaces," said Valiente, an electronics engineer at NUWC Division, Keyport and current project lead for SAISON. "We've just been doing our best to try to find use cases that we felt were important for the Navy to improve at and then try to find good partners."
The initiative began as an Office of Naval Research NavalX-sponsored Prize Challenge prompted by the need to modernize the Navy's aging manual inspection processes. Danny Hubert, who currently serves as acting Chief Technical Officer, established SAISON and secured multiple rounds of funding for the project.
“To establish this effort, I brought together a coalition of subject matter experts from across the Navy ecosystem," said Hubert. “I knew that for any transition to succeed, we couldn't just impose top-down mandates. We needed genuine buy-in from both the personnel on the deckplates living the day-to-day maintenance of these tanks and voids, and the managers responsible for the overarching requirements.”
Hubert added, “Ultimately, this is not a technology problem; industry has already proven that many of these solutions work in commercial applications, and now they must be tailored in a way that allows for adoption by the Navy. We must work more deliberately to integrate these technologies, update our legacy processes and scale them across the enterprise.”
The team quickly began integrating commercial technologies like a magnetic crawling robot and a semi-autonomous hull-grooming robot into shipyard workflows.
According to the citation, the team achieved several historic milestones, including conducting pier-side internal ballast tank inspection on a submarine using a remotely operated vehicle and robotic hull grooming and inspection on a fast-attack submarine using a semi-autonomous robot.
Valiente recently shared these successes directly with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle and Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy John Perryman during their visit to NUWC Division, Keyport in June. He briefed them on the SAISON team’s work to speed up hull integrity inspections and propulsion shaft testing and highlighted the program’s role as a trusted agent in the maintenance modernization ecosystem.
Looking ahead, the SAISON team is exploring ways to automate tube bundle inspections by using robots to pull probes through multiple tubes at once. This could further cut inspection times and reduce the time human workers must spend in cramped, difficult-to-reach spaces.
Hubert said he sees the SAISON effort eventually aligning under the Naval Sea System Command’s Shipyard Modernization Office to ensure technology insertion is continuously distributed and sustained across the Fleet maintenance ecosystem.
The team is continually looking for opportunities to refine and test new technologies for the Fleet.
"We have a proven track record of being able to deliver things that people want in a timely fashion," said Valiente. "We want people to come to us with their problems, so that we can think of solutions and maybe a different way of doing things that haven’t previously been thought of."
-KPT-
Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division, Keyport is headquartered in the state of Washington on the Puget Sound, about 10 miles west of Seattle. To provide ready support to Fleet operational forces at all major Navy homeports in the Pacific, NUWC Division, Keyport maintains detachments in San Diego, California and Honolulu, Hawaii, and remote operating sites in Guam; Japan; Hawthorne, Nevada; and Portsmouth, Virginia. At NUWC Division, Keyport, our diverse and highly skilled team of engineers, scientists, technicians, administrative professionals and industrial craftsmen work tirelessly to develop, maintain and sustain undersea warfare superiority for the United States.
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