WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy will join with Capt. Michael Byman, commander of the Navy Undersea Warfare Center, to announce Thursday details of the overhaul of the Newport building that houses robot vessels.

The $9.9-million project will upgrade a building originally erected in World War II as a steam plant for the Navy base. The new facility, known as the Unmanned Anti-Submarine Warfare Center, will continue to store the craft, which the Navy is developing for surveillance, spying, fighting submarines and other purposes.

But the 15,000-square-foot facility will also house support services for the divers that work with the vessels on the Navy’s range nearby on Narragansett Bay; a high-technology center for tracking the development of the weapons; and storage and testing space for an array of other tools, including torpedoes, systems for conveying divers into the water, targets and secret payloads for the craft.

There will also be a canopied, 3,000-square-foot adjacent space for outdoor work at the facility, which is at Stillwater Basin on Defense Road, north of the piers where Coast Guard cutters and decommissioned warships are docked.

Just as the military has come to rely on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for intelligence and attacking targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy has for some years been developing its robot craft, unmanned surface and underwater vehicles (USVs and UUVs). The vessels can range in size from smaller than kitchen appliances to as big as speedboats or torpedoes.

NUWC has long been the research and development nerve center for the Navy’s submarine tools and weapons, from sonar to torpedoes. It employs more than 4,500 civilian and military government personnel and private contractors.

Reed and Kennedy, members of the appropriations committees in their respective houses, secured the appropriation for the project.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com