The European Commission has selected the research and development projects for the European Defense Fund (EDF) of 2022, three of which have the participation of Navantia: SWAT-SHOAL, E-NACSOS and EUROGUARD. In this way, the company strengthens its position in the main areas of technological development such as naval collaborative operations, autonomous navigation and missions combined with swarms of underwater and surface drones.
The DEFENCESE project is led by Navantia and involves 20 entities from 11 countries, including the Spanish SENER, SAES and GMV. Develops the concept of a Systems System that integrates different types of manned and unmanned vehicles into a swarm to achieve greater efficiency in underwater missions, such as surveillance, reconnaissance, mine war, collaborative clashes or support for amps. Navantia thus strengthens its positioning as an integrator of unmanned vehicle swarms in Command and Control Systems, both underwater and surface, by increasing interoperability in the naval domain.
On the other hand, the objective of the E-NACSOS project is to define the European standard for the exchange and merging of real-time sensor information between Combat Systems, which will strengthen collaborative surveillance in European naval forces and increase the effectiveness of anti-aircraft and surface naval operations. The scope includes the implementation of national demonstrators from participating countries, including both simulated tests and sea tests with real units. The program is led by the French company Naval Group and in addition to Navantia, Indra and the University of Vigo also participate from Spain.
The EUROGUARD project, led by the Estonian company Baltic Workboats, will combine cutting-edge and innovative technologies to develop and build the prototype of a medium-sized semi-autonomous, versatile and pioneering naval ship in its class. Operational tests of the prototype will be carried out in a real environment including the ground control station to be developed by Navantia and from which all the ship’s systems will be monitored and controlled, which may be these scalable developments to other future types of autonomous and semi-autonomous European vessels.
These three projects, which will begin to be implemented from December 2023, amount to an overall amount of 221 M and will contribute to Navantia’s strategy of placing Navantia at the technological forefront of defense companies in Europe.
In this way, Navantia continues its line of collaboration with the main European defense companies, a strategy that has already been supported by EDF in projects such as the design and construction of the European Corvette (EPC), the development of the digital platform of the next generation of European combat ships (EDINAF), the Multi-domain Combat Cloud (EDOCC), the future system of defense against hypersonic missiles (HYDEF), the structural monitoring of naval platforms in combat (dTHOR), the inertial navigation system and quantum gravimeter (EDOCC (EDOCC)Q-SiNG), the offshore offshore platforms (USSPs) or the prospecting of technologies for future naval platforms (DEFENCESE).