Sener designed as technical manager of the European Defense Fund, Navantia-led SWAT-SHOAL project

Sener will act as technical manager of the SWAT-SHOAL project, financed through the European Defense Fund (EDF) and internationally coordinated by Navantia. The objective of the project is the development of technologies for teamwork and swarm mode of unmanned underwater platforms (UTS), within a system of systems (SoS) concept. This way, different types of vehicles, working together as a unit, will be able to face complex scenarios, assigning a specific task to each platform.

SWAT-SHOAL will allow European navies to strengthen their capabilities in different types of missions, such as surveillance and reconnaissance, countermeasures, collaborative combat, or defense against underwater threats.

The project will take advantage of the combination of manned and unmanned vehicles operating in a swarm or squadron formation and equipped with different types of payloads to achieve greater performance in such operations. In addition, it will focus on the execution of missions in confined and shallow waters and will have a relevant component in the development of SoS technologies. SWAT-SHOAL will have a final demonstration phase in which many of these technologies will be tested on different types of platforms in a relevant open water environment.

Sener, as technical manager, will base its participation on its experience in international projects of manned and unmanned collaborative environments, such as COMMANDS (led by Sener, whose objective is to provide a solution to address the challenges in the use of unmanned ground systems in combination or swarming with manned military vehicles and aerial systems) or NGWS/FCAS (in which Sener participates in the remote carriers pillar of the project). At SWAT-SHOAL, Sener will lead the definition of the SoS design process from a model-based systems engineering (MBSE) point of view, as well as the UTS architecture for collaborative work between unmanned platforms and navigation technology development, contributing to the planning and execution of the mission, and collaborative control and guidance of the swarm.

An example of industrial collaboration in Europe

Recently, Brussels, Belgium, held the the launch meeting of the project, in which 20 companies and technology centers from all over Europe collaborate. This inaugural meeting was attended by: Navantia, project coordinator, and Sener, technical manager (Spain); Naval Group Belgium, SEA Europe (Belgium); Cafa Tech (Estonia), Naval Group (France); Atlas Elektronik, Develogic, Fraunhofer, WTD71 (Germany); Prisma Electronics, SORTIRIA (Greece); Fincantieri NexTech (Italy); Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace (Norway); Akademia Marynarki Wojennej, PIAP (Poland); Adyta (Portugal); GMV, SAES (Spain); and Saab Kockums (Sweden).

The project is part of the grant from the European Defense Fund (EDF), under the Grant Agreement EDF-2022-RA-UWW-SWAT-SHOAL.