SESIMBRA, Portugal — An hour from Portugal’s capital, Lisbon, on a clear sunny day in late September, a large, penguin-like robot peeks above the sea surface. It circles a Portuguese Navy ship from a distance, hardly visible to the human eye, concealed by the deep blue waters of the Atlantic ocean.
The system is the Greyshark from Germany’s EuroAtlas, an autonomous underwater vehicle measuring 6.5 meters in length and weighing as much as a delivery van. It is one of the naval drones the German Navy brought to the Portuguese coastal town of Sesimbra to partake in NATO’s Dynamic Messenger and REPMUS exercises.
These drills, which focused on testing over 200 unmanned systems, ran for three weeks in local waters.
An important portion of the training was dedicated to mine countermeasures warfare and the protection of critical underwater infrastructure. European navies are in the process of retooling their naval de-mining procedures with the help of autonomous systems and forward-deployed sensors to keep human divers away from the dangerous work.
Exercise participants employed different types of naval drones to perfect mine hunting operations, which entails the complex work or coordinating the work of multiple robots simultaneously.
“Command and control, for instance, is much more complicated than it was before, because you’re bringing more [robotic] systems into the network – it requires more coordination, more people and a bigger orchestration of small tasks,” Cmdr. Andreas Montag, head of the maritime unmanned systems 3rd Minesweeping Squadron at the German Navy, said.
During REPMUS, the Greyshark, equipped with four high-resolution sonars, LIDAR scanners, electromagnetic detection and two camera systems, was tested for hunting submarines and searching for decoy mines. Officials said that it can reach ranges of up to 8,000 nautical miles, or from Sesimbra to New York and back.
The German Navy also demonstrated two other naval drones from vendor EvoLogics: the Sonobot unmannedsurface vessel and the Quadroin AUV.
The Sonobot was described as acting as a “surface gateway” throughout the exercise, providing underwater positioning and data networks – both wifi and GPS underwater – to other autonomous systems. It is also in use with the Ukrainian military to survey water bodies and detect dangerous objects.
The Quadroin is the underwater variant of the Sonobot, and up to six were used simultaneously during certain missions to look for mines as a swarm.
“For the first time this year, we were able to not only detect mines but also identify them and get a video picture from each one during a single mission – for this the Quadroins split up their roles, some ran a sweep search of the sea floor while others directly swarm to the target and took a picture,” Rui Madeira, commander of the divers group of the Portuguese Navy said during a demonstration on Sept 23.
Each week, the scenarios and tasks assigned increased in difficulty to test the readiness of the different units. For example, diver groups initially knew the zone they had to work in, but would later on find out only shortly before their missions and faced strict time constraints to complete the objective.
The French Navy tested the A9-M AUV, manufactured by Exail, during naval mine warfare operations. The platform was first deployed to survey the seabed, the sonar data were then evaluated on shore, and the potential mines were confirmed by divers or remotely operated vehicles.
For Louis, an officer with the French EOD diver group, the next phase regarding the use of unmanned technology in mine warfare operations will be the integration of artificial intelligence.
“Integrating AI into these drones would allow them to independently classify the threats they detect in the field – currently, the majority of the classification of sonar data is done by human operators after they’ve extracted the data from the system and analyzed on a computer onshore,” the officer, who withheld his last name for security reasons, told Defense News.
While technology is progressing quickly, some hiccups remain.
This was the case with the British Navy, which relied on the REMUS 100 AUV from the company HII to carry out collaborative missions with the U.S. and Dutch Navies.
One naval officer said that on a few occasions during the training, the vehicle overheated due to high temperatures experienced earlier this month. Ad-hoc solutions included keeping the drone cool with blankets and deploying it earlier in the day.
Another mishap involved two Sonobots from the German Navy that collided during a demonstration. Plus, at one point, a Portuguese fishing boat ventured into the exercise zone and struck the French A-9M system, damaging the drone enough that officials had to take it out of the demonstration.
Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.