Riverine Scout Boat and River Gauging to Support Bridge Building.The Riverine Scout Boat was proposed to provide tactical information to the Riverine Patrol Boat crew where visibility and sensor information are limited by islands, vegetation, narrow inlets and choke points. The Scout Boat can provide a rapid and easily deployed way to provide information from blind zones and/or shallow water areas. The Riverine Scout Boat is acoustically quiet: a variety of sensor packages can be integrated into it providing the capability for covert surveillance and intelligence collection.

In a role to provide River Gauging to Support Bridge Building the Z-Boat can be configured with an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) instrument to provide fast and accurate data on river flow rates and discharge volumes. By using the Z-Boat in this configuration there is no need for personnel to enter the river and so this reduces to personnel the risk to personnel inherent in working in dangerous flooding rivers or in rivers with a risk of crocodile attack or other bio-hazards. Gauging a river with a Z-Boat is not limited by access to the river bank, so that the best location for a bridging crossing can be assessed independent of the access that is available to the bank when the river is assessed.

BlueZone UVS General Manager Defence & Water Resources, Andrew Hazell, said that other roles for the Z-Boat were envisioned based on discussions at Army Innovation Day 2016. “These roles included swift water rescue, casualty evacuation, emergency supply provision and rapid environmental assessment,” said Andrew, “The Z-Boat can be seen as a ‘Platform of Possibilities’, and there are a large number of ways where a versatile tool like the Z-Boat could be used ‘off-the-shelf’ for pre & post-mission tasking.”

Z-Boat at Army Innovation Day (120595 KB)