Empowering drones to enhance naval operations: Thales successfully demonstrates latest innovations during Portuguese Naval military exercise

• For the third year in a row, Thales, worldwide leader in underwater and surface warfare systems, took part in the annual REPMUS¹ military exercise hosted in Portugal by the Portuguese Navy, where NATO members were invited to participate.
• During this military at-sea exercise, thanks to the sponsorship of the Portuguese, British and French Navies, Thales leveraged its expertise in unmanned systems and digital technologies to unleash the potential offered by both air and surface drones.
• Over the years, Thales has demonstrated its capacity to deliver cutting-edge solutions to navies across the world, ensuring a high level of responsiveness and flexibility in anti-submarine warfare, anti-mine warfare, and anti-air warfare detection.

At the REPMUS 2024 exercise, Thales showcased its highly innovative solutions in the field of unmanned systems for naval warfare during real-world conditions. Through its multi-drone management solutions, smart sensors and combat management systems specifically designed for unmanned platforms, Thales is supporting navies to develop new concepts of operations, teaming manned and unmanned systems to carry out naval missions with greater responsiveness and flexibility.

Unleashing the full potential of unmanned systems

From 9-27 September 2024, Thales demonstrated its latest innovations to support concept development and experimentation with new technologies for sponsors in the Portuguese, British and French navies. These span unmanned systems designed for all types of missions, both in the underwater (anti-submarine barriers, critical infrastructure protection and anti-mine warfare), and above water (maritime surveillance and anti-surface warfare). Equipped with high-performance smart sensors and systems, various air and surface drones from Thales and its partners Schiebel and Tekever carried out effective surveillance, tracking and protection missions. An advanced command and control system enabled these drones to achieve their mission efficiently but also operate collaboratively and autonomously, under the control of an operator.

“In recent years, drones have proved to be a game-changer for armed forces. To support them, we bring our unique expertise in drone systems, sensors, communications, digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence, for air, as well as above and underwater. Our teams mobilise all their talent to develop innovative systems that exploit the full potential offered by drones for the benefit of navies, whose missions are evolving rapidly and are increasingly carried out in coalition. This was brilliantly demonstrated during the REPMUS exercises organized by the Portuguese Navy, with the invaluable support of our other partner navies and OTAN invited countries.” Philippe Duhamel, EVP Defence Mission Systems, Thales.

REPMUS demonstrations enabled Thales and partners to:

• Highlight the value of modular, multi-mission unmanned systems that comprise unmanned vehicles operating with a range of payloads, integrated with different Command and Control systems to achieve naval mission objectives.
• Test and prove the effectiveness of detection, identification and monitoring of threats by collecting and processing, in real time, data from sensors on-board the various unmanned systems with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) while guaranteeing overall coherence with the Combat Management System.
• Successfully federate several air and surface drones, automatically creating mission plans, tasking and ensuring complete supervision.
• Increase projection capability through communication systems integrated into unmanned aerial systems to relay operational data, enabling greater responsiveness, a reduction in human resources, costs and environmental footprint, and to demonstrate supervision systems deployed on surface ships.
• Experiment with the Royal Navy additional surveillance missions capacities for RWUAS (Multi-Mission Rotary Wing Unmanned Air System) enhancing the system with new capabilities in smart sensors and combat management systems.
• Confirm compatibility with NATO interoperability standards, currently under development

Empowering drones through Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The use of AI-boosted sensors and systems improves the ability to detect, identify and track threats in real-time using data collected by sensors. For instance, AI algorithms were used to automatically detect abnormal behaviour in the positioning and trajectory of ships, to analyse images captured by sensors on the Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV), to identify any unusual activities or patterns that may indicate a security threat. This empowerment of drones enables a higher volume of data to be treated as well as continuous situation monitoring, thus saving the armed forces valuable time.

While aerial and maritime drones are undoubtedly valuable assets, they require multiple operators and extensive coordination for effective control. By leveraging AI, Thales increases autonomy among its unmanned systems, enabling them to automatically raise an alert, formulate mission plans and even select the most suitable drone among a fleet as soon as a potential threat is detected. This enables operators to supervise missions in real time. An interface integrates the entire drone fleet and operators can take control of drone systems at any time, keeping humans at the centre of the decision-making process.

About Thales

Thales (Euronext Paris: HO) is a global leader in advanced technologies specialized in three business domains: Defence & Security, Aeronautics & Space, and Cybersecurity & Digital identity.

It develops products and solutions that help make the world safer, greener and more inclusive.

The Group invests close to €4 billion a year in Research & Development, particularly in key innovation areas such as AI, cybersecurity, quantum technologies, cloud technologies and 6G.

Thales has close to 81,000 employees in 68 countries. In 2023, the Group generated sales of €18.4 billion.

Artificial Intelligence at Thales

Thales is a key player in trusted, cyber-secure, transparent, explainable, and ethical AI, serving the armed forces, aircraft manufacturers, and critical infrastructure operators. The Group employs over 600 engineers specializing in AI, and around 100 PhD students are conducting their research in this field.

Organized within Thales's AI accelerator, including AI Lab for research, AI Factory for systems (including decision support systems), and AI Sensors (for sonar, radar, radios, and optronics), these experts contribute to integrating AI into more than a hundred of Thales's products and services. Leveraging state-of-the-art sensor and system technologies, Thales's AI capabilities meet the full range of needs in defence, space, aerospace, cybersecurity, and digital identity sectors. Trusted AI addresses the security and sovereignty requirements of Thales's clients, enhancing data analysis and human decision-making, accelerating the detection, identification, and classification of objects or scenes of interest, while considering specific constraints such as cybersecurity, deployability, and efficiency in critical environments.In 2023, Thales ranked first in Europe for AI patent filings related to critical systems.

¹ The 2024 REPMUS edition is co-organized by the Portuguese Navy, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), NATO Science and Technology Organization Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (NATO STO CMRE), NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Initiative (NATO MUSI) and European Defence Agency (EDA).